


Alive and Well (And Living in Hell)

by dear_tiger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-16
Updated: 2011-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-26 03:45:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/278310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_tiger/pseuds/dear_tiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At least thirteen people claim to have either personally witnessed or participated in the death of Sam or Dean Winchester, sometimes both. Oh well. They say true love never dies.</p><p>After they're killed like zombies, Sam and Dean wake up in Hell and Heaven. Sam finds Jess – now an old Hell veteran with a screaming, swearing monster she carries in a bag. While they are trying to stay sane and more or less in one piece, Dean has to think of a scheme bad enough to get kicked out of Heaven. It’s a story of zombie love – for one’s brother and for the world of the living – that’s strong enough to make two men and one woman crawl back out of the grave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alive and Well (And Living in Hell)

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by: siehn and monsterfan
> 
> Art: by tripoli8, located at http://tripoli8.livejournal.com/489124.html Check it out, because it's all sorts of amazing.

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000kse4/)

**Prologue.**

_\- I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead and found a passage to life, aided only by one glimmering and seemingly ineffectual light._ (Mary Shelley, _Frankenstein_ )

 

Dean is not asleep but not awake either, bobbing in and out of consciousness. When he surfaces, he catches bits of Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing” on the radio and feels vaguely annoyed that he couldn’t get _Van Halen_ or Jim Morrison but had to end up with the pansy combination of the two. He dives again, and the song becomes an indistinguishable murmur like that noise you hear inside a seashell. Sammy’s laughter runs through him in tiny electrical shocks and brings him to the surface once more. It’s just enough to realize that what he’s taking for waves of some mysterious sleepy ocean is actually rumbling of a great engine passing vibrations through his body. Dean goes under again.

He is comfortable, floating in that detached state when nothing aches or strains and the absence of pain is taken for absence of body. Dean imagines, during another one of his brief resurfacings, that he doesn’t have a body at all but has become an unattached head full of unformed thoughts. That image, once solidified, pulls him further out of sleep because really, there is nothing nice about detached heads. Dean thinks about moving his leg and feels a muscle twitch in response: oh good, he still has a body then.

 _…not zombies,_ says Sam’s voice from somewhere far away, maybe from a dream he had last week. _Morons._

“She lives on a farm in Indiana,” says the real Sam on his left. Dean can’t remember anyone they care to know in Indiana.

“It’s good of you boys to visit her. Old folks get lonely.” Dean doesn’t recognize that other voice and wakes up all the way.

He’s in the cabin of a semi, leaning against the window while Sam bounces on the seat in the middle. Dean doesn’t move except to lift his eyelids just enough to peer through his lashes. A Sam-shaped blot to his left, all teeth and shaggy hair, smiles at the driver. Something keeps jumping and jerking in front of the windshield, and when Dean opens his eyes a little more, it resolves into a figure of a goofy devil made up of wire and pieces of plastic tubing that look like they came from a ballpoint pen. Every time the truck hits a dent in the road, the devil performs wild somersaults. Dean pokes at it experimentally, and it jerks and jiggles at his touch.

“Looks like your brother’s awake,” says the trucker. Dean doesn’t think he knows his name but has some vague memory wandering the back of his brain about talking to this man at a truck stop a few miles outside of Atlanta. “Sleep well?”

“What time is it?”

It’s Sam who answers, all serene and cool in a tone that says more than his words. “It’s one in the morning. Go back to sleep.” _Calm down,_ is what he means. _We’re okay._

“Your brother was just telling me about your grandma.”

“Sure was.”

“She’s lucky to have you boys. Paying her a surprise visit! I’ve a daughter myself about Sam’s age, and don’t get me wrong, I love every single hair on her head, but I couldn’t pay her enough to visit my folks. Too boring for her, you know, too far from civilization.”

“Oh, we don’t mind.” Sam smiles, all syrupy sweetness. He never had a grandmother in his life and probably never will. Looking at Sam now, Dean is struck with realization that grandparents must be something like exotic lizards to him: he knows some people have them, he’s seen them around but damned if he knows what to do with one. Dean isn’t much better himself, having picked up all his notions of grandparents from TV. “She hunts rabbits, you know,” Sam says. “She makes the best rabbit stew in the Midwest, and a rhubarb and strawberry pie for dessert. We were hoping she would take us rabbit hunting this summer. We’ve never been.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Good old Granny. She’s the coolest woman in the world.”

There is no grandmother or anybody who knows them closer than Minnesota. They’ve been travelling for days, all the way from Albuquerque, chasing after _Aerosmith_ but arriving just a day or a few hours too late every time. If Dad returns home early from a hunt to find them gone, they’re both dead meat. They have no money for tickets if they do catch up with the band but Dean is planning on figuring out that part when they get there. For now, Dean has the open road, a faint promise of a rock concert and his beanpole of a teenage brother next to him.

He has no idea if Sam already named their imaginary grandmother from Indiana, so he makes a mental note to stick to “Grandma”. Sam does this every once in a while: spins pointless lies to strangers, wild tales of lives sometimes made-up and sometimes borrowed from other people. Sam never appropriates the life stories of anyone their dad saved on his hunts though, as if he thinks that by claiming even a morsel of their stories he’ll also claim their misfortune. It’s cute, and Dean will never tell him he noticed.

The lies themselves Dean just can’t figure out. He doesn’t think that Sam covets these lives he makes up – maybe some but surely not all, as ones are outright boring and others are a tinge sad. He suspects that Sam enjoys the very process of storytelling.

Lulled by Sam’s inspired bullshit, Dean begins to fall asleep again. Eyes almost all the way closed, he watches the devil jerk its limbs comically out of sync with Van Morrison’s singing.

_…And you shall take me strongly in your arms again. And I will never ever, ever, ever grow so old again…_

_…he’s an insurance investigator. He travels a lot all across the country, but Dean and I, we’ve barely ever been anywhere except our own backyard and Grandma’s farm._

Dean drifts off to sleep again, and the tubing-and-wire devil dissolves into a patch of ink-stained fog. _And I will never ever, ever, ever…_

_…not zombies, you morons._

The words scratch at the edges of Dean’s awareness. The voice is Sam’s but older, deeper, and it sounds like someone really should’ve given him a drink of water. It pains Dean somehow that this older Sam from his dream couldn’t have something to drink, that he was thirsty and thinking about zombies.

Zombies?

Some distant worry is like a zombie, he thinks, gnawing at his ankle. Like this, with his eyes closed and the undead on his mind, Dean’s head spins like he’s falling. The smell of damp earth so out of place in the semi hits him out of nowhere. He feels as if he’s just been knocked down to his knees and realizes that this happened sometime, maybe not too long ago. Sam was with him, their shoulders pressed together. It’s a foreign and a very, very bad memory.

Dean jerks awake just in time to see a crossroads approaching in the headlights where a country road intersects the highway. There’s a signpost with road numbers that he can’t read from this far but it makes his skin crawl, as if the moment he reads what the signs say an awful knowledge will come to him.

Sam carries on about the school they supposedly go to and is making up a stupid mascot.

_And I will never, ever, ever, ever grow so old again…_

Dean closes his eyes to block out the looming crossroads, the dancing devil and the curve of Sam’s lips spilling sweet, indulgent lies. But the truck runs over a fallen branch that snaps with a sound like gunshot, and Dean’s memory supplies a second boom a fraction of a moment later. He looks again to see the crossroads rushing by and reads “Hwy 42” on one of the plates, like the answer to Life, Universe…

“…and Everything,” Dean says. He blinks, momentarily blinded by the headlights reflecting off chrome plating, glass and black metal – the Impala, impossibly, parked on the side of the road.

When he opens his eyes again, the truck is gone, along with Sam, the crossroads and the signpost. Dean is standing alone in the middle of highway 42 next to the Impala, a gun tucked in the back of his jeans and the wire devil in his hand. He spins around but there’s nothing except the road and woods on both sides of it.

“Sam? Sammy?”

Dean can feel memories buzzing in the backyard of his consciousness, as if he only needs to think of the crossroads a little harder to bring them back. He doesn’t want to, not yet. That trip from Albuquerque, chasing _Aerosmith,_ was the summer of ’98. They did catch up with the band. The first song was “Living on the Edge”, and the opening chords made him feel like electricity was running down his spine. Sam sneaked off to the bathroom at some point, then came back and threw his boxers. Dean laughed till his head nearly exploded.

It’s not a good thought, about exploding heads. He chases it away quickly.

Sam does not even listen to _Aerosmith_ that much but he jumped and waved his arms and sang along. Naturally, he knew all the lyrics: Dean raised him right, after all. Sam loved it all, he would have sang along and threw boxers at Elton John then, just because it was summer and they were on a real road trip for fun and not tracking down the next monster with Dad.

They didn’t get in trouble, but years later Dean looked through Dad’s journal and found a photograph cut out of a magazine and “laminated” with Scotch tape. It showed three girls screaming their heads off at a rock concert, and in the background, him and Sam.

“Huh.” Dean looks around. He is alone but the Impala and a bunch of cicadas hiding in the surrounding fields. The sky is a mass of blue and purple cosmic lights that turn slowly, nauseatingly around a blacked-out moon. “I guess we’re dead again.”

It’s not just him but both of them. He doesn’t want to think about it but keeps catching glimpses of memories – kneeling in the dirt next to Sam, feeling the touch of his shoulder. There were two gunshots a fraction of a second apart. The smell of gunpowder keeps trailing after him, almost imperceptible, so he figures, yeah, they’re both dead.

“Motherfucker.” Who was it this time? He’s going to think about it later and figure it out. Dean spins around but the road is still empty. “Cas? Hey, Cas?”

There isn’t even an echo as the sound of his voice dissipates over the empty stretch of asphalt. The cicadas fall quiet for a moment to consider him with their insect brains before resuming their song. The sky keeps rolling and rolling, and no angel swoops down from it.

“Fine.” Dean opens the Impala’s door and gets inside, finding the keys left in the ignition. The engine comes to life with a familiar roar and the radio turns on, pouring out “Wish You Were Here”. “Really?” he says to the empty air. “Really, you guys are gonna play me my own soundtrack?”

_How I wish, how I wish you were here…_

“Cheese balls.” He taps on the radio. “Castiel?”

 _…Not zombies, you morons,_ says Sam in his head, voice hoarse. He should have been given a drink of water, and it drives Dean nuts to hear him speak like that, to know that he’ll be… yeah, in a few moments. And he couldn’t even have a sip of water.

 _Just lucky, I guess._ That was him who said it. Then there were two gunshots but Dean isn’t going to think about that for now. He died before and it scares the shit out of him every single time. And isn’t it a bitch that Sam had to go down right along with him on this one.

Speaking of Sam. Dean takes the Impala out of park and starts down the road. Cas still hasn’t tuned in and the radio is getting on his nerves, so he switches it off. An angel should be able to turn it back on when and if he decides to make an appearance. Dean puts his foot down on the accelerator.

If he doesn’t force attention on the memories, they come back slowly, just barely on the edge of his awareness. He and Sam were walking out of a bar when they got jumped in an alley by five men, Roy and Walt among them, and dammit, Dean knew he should’ve made time to find those two assholes. They got a few punches in, broke a couple of bones. The fuckers thought they were zombies or something worse, undead and unquiet. Vaguely, Dean remembers being dragged out of the back of a van in the middle of the crossroads marked “Hwy 42” and something else he couldn’t read from his angle.

Dean realizes he is fingering the back of his head and makes himself stop. The land on both sides of the road inexplicably turned into Arizona desert at some point, boiling with life in the middle of the night. He sees a lonely house approaching on the left, with the lights on and a glass of lemonade set on the porch, weeping moisture. This is his own memory and it stirs something pleasant in his chest. He drives past it.

When everything else fails, you bury a monster at a crossroads, facedown so it won’t chew its way out of the ground. You cut off its head and drive a stake through its body. They’ve done it before to things that just kept popping right back out of their grave, when even salt and fire couldn’t quiet them. It’s no wonder that they ended up like this, really, and Dean should have known.

The land around him ripples and changes as the Impala picks up speed. Bits of small towns give way to city streets that turn into pockets of wilderness – from different years and different states. Dean recognizes his own good memories and blows past them. There’re others that must be Sam’s – most familiar, some not – that rise out of the dust on both sides of the road, but all of them are dark and uninhabited. Dean searches a few and finds them empty of even those people that Sam’s memory should’ve supplied.

It hits him inside the Stanford chapel – dark and empty and smelling faintly of candlewax – that Sam isn’t here. Not in the chapel, not in one of the houses of strangers who invited him to Thanksgiving a million years ago, and not anywhere. Dean feels as if there was a radio wave constantly hissing with static that he wasn’t even conscious of, and now that it’s gone the absence is deafening. Dean is completely alone in the entire Heaven.

“Sam? Sammy?” The echo answers with his brother’s name.

****

_Inter the corpse where the road forks, so that when it springs from the grave, it will not know which path to follow. Drive a stake through its heart: it will be stuck to the ground at that fork, it will haunt that place that leads to many other places, that point of indecision. Behead the corpse, so that, acephalic, it will not know itself as a subject, only as pure body._

_The monster is born at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture._

(Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Monster Culture (Seven Theses). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996.)

 

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](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000ptqt/)

****

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](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000g1xy/)

 

**I.**

_\- I have a bad, bad feeling that my baby don’t live here no more._ (Jimi Hendrix)

 

Hunters gossip like old ladies or the proverbial sewing circle. Hunters gossip like a bunch of men and women spread all over the US who only keep in touch with the rest through a disorganized verbal communication network. It’s a lot of “Joe’s friend” and “Lily’s hunting partner” and “a guy who knows a guy who knows Bobby Singer”.

Rumors are like hydras: you cut off one head and three more spring up in its place. Just try correcting some little piece of gossip about George that someone got wrong and see how that story evolves, twists and breeds with the older version to produce some fugly bastard that George will hear three months down the line and not recognize.

There once was a guy named John Winchester who mostly hunted alone and kept to himself. The poor bastard got his wife killed by some bad thing that he longed to get his hands on. They say he had two kids – “his boys” he always rushed home to, though no one ever saw them. Joe said that Dylan mentioned the other day that Kevin thought the kids died and were haunting John’s cherry Impala. He might’ve killed them himself, even. It’s not as if anybody in the hunters’ world is terribly stable.

(This is the first death.)

At least thirteen people claim to have either personally witnessed or assisted in the death of Sam or Dean Winchester, or sometimes both. There’re more deaths that no one claims to have seen but people certainly talk about. Three even made it on TV – two for Dean and one for Sam.

(Those are the second through the thirty second deaths.)

Oh well. They say true love never dies.

****

Time still functions in Hell. Sam’s watch is useless – the hands keeps spinning and changing directions at varying speed – but he tracks the pattern of demons’ activity. There’s a period of about twenty hours when hordes of them gallop all over the place, grab people and drag them off to the racks. Then comes a quieter stretch of about fifteen hours – sixteen, for an even thirty-six-hour day – when only the “night shift” is at work on particularly nasty sinners who get no break for anything. That doesn’t mean that a random person cannot be dragged off for a few extra hours of torture if a demon feels productive. Flesh starts healing after those first twenty hours, with the exclusion of what must be penance wounds that never disappear.

Sam estimated the time by his own exhaustion, knowing approximately how long it takes for him to get sleepy in spite of pain, to get lightheaded or to start seeing double. It’s a very rough estimate because he can’t factor in the effects of constant pain and hunger but it makes him feel a little better. It’s like he’s got a grip on Hell, just a tiny bit.

Go figure. Demons have circadian rhythms.

It took him about a week to get used to the place enough to regain mental function. He’s not entirely sure how that’s possible: if he puts his hand on the back of his skull, there’s a gaping exit wound there, sharp and ugly, and Sam is pretty sure he’s missing a good chunk of his brain. He’s not brave enough to stick his hand inside and feel around, though he wants to. The entrance wound on his forehead is much smaller and less unnerving. Sam took to a nasty compulsive habit of circling it with his thumb and pressing in.

And he’s hungry – constantly, incessantly, but not enough to drive him insane. It reminds him of a few bad stretches when he and Dean would have a peanut butter sandwich each for the whole day. He’s hungry to the point of food fantasies, to the point of being unable to forget his stomach or sleep for more than a few hours, but he’s not hungry to the point of trying to eat somebody. Small mercies, Sam thinks. Perhaps this is a more effective torture because if he actually ate somebody he might be sated for the day, and that just won’t do.

It’s Bela Talbot that comes for him that day. She’s one of the human interns, and her eyes are still blue. Sam looks into those eyes as she’s closing the manacles around his wrists and asks his usual question, “Where’s my brother?”

She looks away. Sam thinks she’s not cut out for this job – not with the way her eyes look red and puffy every morning. “He’s in the deepest pit of Hell,” she says, as usual.

“Bela, you’re so full of shit.”

“I’m not, sweetheart.” She kisses the hole in his forehead and picks up a scalpel. “Dean is being ripped apart as we speak, and then they’re going to put him back together and do it all over again.”

Sam stares at the tip of the scalpel as every muscle in his body starts twitching and trembling. “Right,” he says, teeth clattering. “Sure he is.”

He has to ask before she starts because after, he won’t have the mental capacity to think about Dean. Bela always tells him of the deepest pit of Hell, and Marmaduke says that Dean is with the new Head Torturer, up close and personal, and Luke says that Dean has been erased from existence. Between the three lazy assholes that don’t compare notes, Sam figures that Dean isn’t in Hell at all. He screamed himself hoarse in the first two weeks looking for him. These days, he’s certain that Dean isn’t here, and it used to be a small consolation but not anymore.

It is, however, a comfort to ask. When he was little, Sam was afraid that a dinosaur might walk into the room while he slept, so he asked Dean or Dad every night before sleep, ‘Will anyone come in here?’ Never mind the exasperated requests to leave it alone, he always got the same answer and it calmed him down.

“By the way, you’re crap at this,” he says, just to get her started.

Hell has a sky, too – it looks like monstrous tissue contracting, relaxing and constantly squirming up above. It’s like being in a stomach of a creature that suffers from indigestion.

After Bela is done with him, Sam lies in a more or less shapeless pile under that sky, at the foot of a mountain made of fused splinters of bone. The sky is twitching like it’s having pangs of hunger to match Sam’s own. He rolls over on his stomach so he wouldn’t have to look at it and concentrates on breathing. In and out. In and out again, but slower.

“…you useless, pathetic whore! What a sick wretch you are!”

Sometimes Sam wonders what it’d be like if everyone in Hell just shut up for a goddamn minute. Maybe he’ll organize a flash mob one day – a minute of silence for the sake of everyone’s mental health. After the minute, everyone so inclined can go on shaking their fists at the sky and blaming whoever for their fate, but for one minute they all can have the quiet. Even if the demons mount a counterattack and start screeching all at once, it won’t be half bad.

The Useless Whore Guy has a high nasal voice that irritates Sam’s freshly restored eardrums. Unfortunately, he only comes closer as his accusations turn into wordless wailing. Sam opens one eye, still lying on his stomach. A pair of girl’s feet stops next to his head, and judging by the screaming, the poor thing is carrying the Useless Whore, probably as some kind of penance of her own. Sam studies her toenails painted with pearly polish – a relic from prior life, like Sam’s wristwatch. Maybe she’ll go away if he plays dead.

“Hey, Winchester.”

“Go away,” he says. “Please.”

She sighs and sits down next to him instead. Sam stares at the three moles dotting her thigh until he gets tired of them and just wants to close his eyes for a while.

After two hours, no one but the Useless Whore has said a word. Sam’s abdominal muscles finish pulling themselves together – he feels the final snap and relief that comes after it.

“…selfish, so selfish, you filthy traitor…”

“Can you shut him up?” Sam asks the three moles.

“I wish. Sleep, Sam, it’ll make you feel better.”

A warm hand touches the back of his neck, fingers tangle in his hair gently, and it’s the most amazing thing in the world. Sam’s asleep within minutes. He dreams of Highway 42 in Wisconsin where it intersects some state park road. But the girl’s hand strokes his hair and massages his scalp like no one’s done in ages, and Wisconsin goes away under her fingers. It’s replaced with much nicer dreams, dreams of a spring in Arizona from years and years before when he and Dean went looking for shed rattlesnake skin.

When he wakes up, the constellation of moles is still there. Only now that he’s in less pain, Sam knows the moles, knows the thigh and knows the voice.  
“Jessica.”

She smiles down at him when he rolls over.

****

“You gotta understand, man.” Ash takes a huge puff of his joint and lifts his eyes to the ceiling of the Roadhouse. Dean waits, wondering if he’ll still be coherent enough to finish that thought when he looks back down. When Ash looks at him again, his eyes are clear. “Their entire judicial system is utterly fucked. You think the one we have on earth is bad – you should take a look at Heaven and Hell.”

“I must ask you to be more respectful when taking about God’s Law,” Castiel says. He refused the beer earlier and is eating salted nuts. “What you need to understand, Dean, is that both you and Sam came here before because of Zachariah’s petitioning. And now that no angel asks for special placement for you, you’re judged like other mortals.”

“What are you, chopped liver?”

Castiel considers it. “No.”

“Why don’t you ask?”

“I’m sorry, Dean. I don’t have the authority. Besides, Zachariah only used to ask for temporary placement as he fully intended to restore you back to life.”

Dean thumps his head on the bar, and then again for good measure. Ash and Castiel both look away to give him some privacy in self-flagellation.

“Sam did release the Devil from his prison,” says Castiel.

“Gee, thanks. He also put him back in – does that count for nothing?”

“Perhaps the two acts canceled one another out, perhaps not. There’re still a number of lesser sins, particularly those committed after his initial release from Hell without his soul.”

Dean thumps his head on the bar again. “Fucking dumbass judgment. Who determines the placement then?”

“The Egyptians, believe it or not,” says Ash. “The ostrich feather, the scales, the crocodile goddess and everything – they have it.”

“What? Why?”

“It worked.”

“Their system was the most efficient of all pagan systems,” Castiel adds. “They took pleasure in their work and were disinclined to enter a confrontation with us.”

“That’s awesome, Cas. How do I appeal?”

“You can’t. The verdict is final and absolute.”

“Such bullshit, Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you guys!” Ash pours him another whisky which Dean drains with a grateful nod. The drink doesn’t even give him a buzz. “What do I do to bust Sam out of Hell?”

Ash looks at Castiel whose people skills are rusty once again and who doesn’t look back at him, though the moment is appropriate. Dean thinks that maybe he’ll strangle them both one day, starting with the next bastard that tells him he’s got to understand this or that. Dean doesn’t feel like he needs to understand shit about how Heaven and Hell work because his brother is in the latter. Again. Only this time no one has any particular interest in restoring either one of them back to life.

Deep down, Dean can feel panic building up, eating away at his insides.

“I’m sorry, Dean,” says Castiel. “But Sam must remain in Hell.”

“This sucks, man, this whole soulmate business,” says Ash.

Dean gives him a nasty look. “We’re not talking about the soulmate business.”

“I’m just saying. Don’t have one, don’t want one. You’re, like, the only person I’ve ever seen in Heaven who is completely miserable.”

Dean goes running every morning, sometimes twice a day: not because he needs to stay active here to keep himself in good shape but because it clears his head. He runs the _axis mundi_ past all the memory places – his lively and Sam’s sad and empty – and completely ignores them in favor of staring at the asphalt underfoot. In one hour, Dean can pass through Florida swamps, the Stanford campus and Oregon woods; when he runs back, he can hit a patch of Denver air that gives way to Highway 66. (But not 42, never 42.) That is, if Dean feels like running back: he figured that geography of his own goddamn useless slice of Heaven changes according to his moods and wishes. He set up camp in a house in Arizona that they used to live in years ago, and now he always finds it around the corner if he wants it.

The place is swarming with memories of Sam that Dean avoids if he can help it. The last thing he needs is a sweet distraction to make him forget that the real Sam, his Sam, is in Hell.

Day and night have no meaning in Heaven: he passes from light to darkness and back again just as easily as he goes between states, and most of his and Sam’s good memories happened at night, for some reason. His wristwatch still works, though. He found out he doesn’t need to sleep, not unless he wants to, which is convenient: even here Dean dreams of their last death, of Sam’s harsh voice and of the two gunshots. Thanks to the nightmares – and he only slept twice, just enough to figure out that the dreams were going to be a pattern – he now knows little details as well, like the way he turned to look at Sam at the last moment and caught a bullet with the side of his head, or the way Sam’s whole body jerked. He could’ve done without those.

_Sam, oh god, Sammy, I’m so sorry._

Heaven sucks ass. Did the first time around and only got worse, if anything, and there isn’t nearly enough boobs and action.

Dean is running through Blue Earth, Minnesota on a Christmas night when what he was taking for a bush moves on the side of the street. He’s about ten feet away and moving at a good speed, so he almost takes a nosedive trying to change his course before he gets any closer.

For one insane, heart-stopping moment he thinks it’s Sam.

“Evening. My apologies for intruding on you. My name is Barnael.”

Dean takes in the glasses, the wild curls and the cheap suit the man is wearing. “What, you guys specifically prefer tax accountants and vacuum cleaner salesmen?”

“There seems to be a lot of devout followers among the men of certain professions.”

“Uh-huh.” Dean remembers all the goons with their military-style haircuts and bulging muscles and yeah, that makes sense. No atheists in a foxhole or, apparently, in a cubicle. “I’d need Jesus, too.”

The angel fixes him with an unblinking stare. Dean thinks, _What the hell._ “Say, dude, you wouldn’t happen to have enough mojo to have somebody transferred out of Hell, would you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

As they stand there, the snow begins to fall. Out of the corner of his eye, Dean can see a shadow of Pastor Jim moving in the house. If he were to walk inside, there’d be hot chicken pie and a Sammy-shaped hallucination. That’s exactly why he won’t do such a thing. “So, Barnael,” he says. “Did you ambush me for a reason?”

At that, the angel’s whole body comes into motion. He bounces up comically and waves his short arms around as if he wants to grab something to occupy his hands but can’t find anything within reach. “Ah, yes! Forgive me, but you’re Dean Winchester, are you not?”

“And if I am?”

The angel scrunches up his face in confusion. “Are you not sure?”

“For Christ’s sake! I’m Dean Winchester, now _what,_ man?”

“Please don’t be angry. I couldn’t help myself: you’re the man that defeated Michael and Lucifer and destroyed Zachariah. It’s… a lot for one mortal.”

Dean feels tired suddenly, like the angel’s praise or whatever called attention to things he hasn’t been aware of. All the energy built up by the run drains out of him. He wants Arizona around the next corner, and to go to sleep in a creaking house with the smell of snakeskin and Sam. Maybe Ash will know a trick for keeping the dreams away.

“Michael and Lucifer – that wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything. I killed Zachariah, sure, but I don’t imagine that counts as a virtue around here, though he was a dick.” He rubs his eyes to get melted snow and sleep out. “Anyways, thanks for watching or whatever.”

“You are modest, but it’s an impressive feat for a man. You must have faith.”

“Sure, man. I have faith in my little brother.” Without waiting for more fan questions, Dean turns and takes off down the _axis mundi_ towards where it makes a turn at a Blue Earth street corner. By the time he rounds the corner, there’s nothing but snow-covered bushes draped with Christmas lights in front of Pastor Jim’s house.

****

“Rotting fingers are for stealing. Sores on the face are for vanity. Bad teeth are for being rude to people, I think. I haven’t quite figured out that one.” Jessica flashes him a smile full of pearly teeth. “The guy I asked was an asshole, so…”

_What’s a messenger bag with a screaming, insulting cadaver in it for?_

It’s so much like their first real date together – walking slowly with no particular purpose, her long strides matching his. Only there’s a boiling swamp on the left instead of farmer’s market stands and an enormous black tree up ahead instead of an apartment complex in Palo Alto. And let’s not forget the Stupid Whore that keeps wailing inside the bag slung over Jess’s shoulder. Sam learned to mostly ignore him after the first hour.

Jessica ducks her head, hiding behind her hair. It’s uncurled here and singed a little, and she is wearing the same white nightdress that she had on the night she died.

“Bleeding gums are for lying,” she says quietly.

Sam lifts his own hand to his lips, licks the back of it and stares at the bloody smudge. “Jess…”

“Shhh.” She doesn’t look at him, preferring to stare at the boiling swamp like there’s actually something pretty there. Sam knows without seeing that she’s biting her lip. “Fatal wounds I haven’t figured out yet. Sometimes they’re there, and sometimes they aren’t. They seem to be more complex and there’re so many of them.” She hasn’t asked how he got a chunk of his skull blown away. Sam hasn’t asked why she’s in Hell in the first place. He’s building up to it.

“So,” he says. “What’s hunger for?”

Jess stops and looks him straight in the face – something she’s barely done since showing up on the hillside. “Addiction. Hunger is for substance abuse.”

“I see.”

“What in the hell did you get into, Sam, after I was gone? What were you into, what happened to you? They talk in here, about you – that you’re a demon hunter, that you let out the Devil.”

Sam drops his gaze. The ground is liquid mud that their feet are slowly sinking into now that they’ve stopped. He sees something wriggling around his and Jess’s feet. “Hey, let’s keep going ‘cause we’re sinking here.” She doesn’t protest and follows him towards the twisted black tree but Sam can practically hear the expectation in the air. “Look, Jess, I’m so… I don’t even know how to…”

“Later, okay? Apologize later. I’m not ready yet.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. So what, drugs?”

Sam looks up at the sky that’s quivering in this part of Hell, like glossy backs of countless insects ready to take flight. He realizes he was about to lie. “Demon blood, actually.”

Jessica thinks about it for a minute. “What, you couldn’t get hooked on crack like a normal person?” But she giggles, and Sam feels something drain out of him and it makes things better.

“Yeah, always a freak.”

“So what happened to Dean?”

Sam stumbles and almost falls into the mud but catches himself in time. If he lands in there, the things in the mud will burrow through his eyes – he knows, he’s had that happen. Jessica reaches out to catch him but drops her hand again when she sees that he isn’t about to fall.

“I didn’t think you’d remember. You only met him briefly. Dean’s in Heaven, I think, or at least he isn’t here. But I don’t believe he made it. We were kind of in a tight spot there.” He realizes he is rubbing the bullet hole with his thumb and puts his hand down. “He’s a good guy but he probably hates it up there.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s pretty dumb. He didn’t like it the first time around and we had a huge fight.”

“Sam, you’re not making sense.”

“That happens sometimes.”

They walk some more, and then Jessica slips an arm around his side without saying anything, and presses closer. Sam drops a hand on her shoulder, falling into a familiar pattern. And it’s nice, so nice to feel another warm body against his.

“You’re an asshole, Winchester, for lying to me. But I guess we’re okay.”

“Okay then. Thanks.”

They pass the tree and keep walking to the twisted woods beyond, accompanied all the way by the screams and cursing from Jessica’s bag.

“So what’s with Mr. Stupid Whore in there?”

“I’ll tell you when you tell me why you’re in Hell.”

It’s not as if she has many illusions about him left, Sam thinks, but what’s wrong with wanting to be remembered as the sweet guy from Stanford who went driving with her on the weekends and who had _prospects_ and such things? Maybe he wants to be remembered with fondness. Sam doesn’t say anything for the rest of the downtime and thinks about Dean instead.

There is a self-indulgent, annoying thought that keeps circulating through his brain that Dean wouldn’t like it in Heaven without Sam. They know that much about each other after all this time. Of course, if Sam was to look Dean in the eye and say, ‘I know you’d hate anywhere without me,’ he’d get a punch on the nose and would have to walk back to the motel. If Dean was to tell Sam the same thing, Sam would insult him and fuck with his coffee. Sam misses Dean like crazy, misses him enough to almost want him in Hell, but missing one’s brother is a part of the general nastiness of the place. Dean, however, is supposed to be in a nice place, and he would absolutely hate it there. What kind of an eternal reward is that?

When Marmaduke drags him off to the rack at the end of downtime and Jessica is whisked away in the other direction, Sam is still trying to finish his thought, as if there’s some conclusion there that he needs to get to.

Marmaduke straps down his arms and legs.

Sam takes a deep breath of hellish air pungent with sulfur. “Where’s my brother?” His muscles begin to tremble as his heart picks up the pace in horrified anticipation.

****

The house in Bisbee is haunted. If Dean doesn’t want his memories manifesting in there, they don’t – until he starts falling asleep or gets distracted. If he empties the Impala’s trunk and sits down to clean the weapons, sooner or later he starts humming under his nose, or brooding, or he simply gets lost in his own head until floorboards creak in the old house and a sigh flutters through the hallway. Sometimes he can hear Sammy – his memory of Sammy here – moving dishes and opening cupboards in the kitchen. Other times, he walks into the bathroom and smells soap that disappeared from stores at least a decade ago. The kitchen smells of oatmeal and brown sugar, and the bedroom of shed rattlesnake skin and cotton linen.

Dean hung his wire-and-tubing devil on the porch because it doesn’t belong in the memories. He meant for it to ward-off the pretend ghosts of this place but it seems to do the opposite.

The rental house with its creaky floorboards, leaky roof and peeling paint stands on a hillside over the town. When Dean sits on the porch with Ash, Castiel or his devil for company, he can see lights moving along town streets, as if Bisbee here is actually inhabited. It creeps Dean out: the dead town at the bottom of the hill, populated with phantom lights, and he’s the only living inhabitant. Well, sort of living.

When he looks at the lights down below, he thinks of Hell, and it is these thoughts that give him inspiration.

When Dean returns from his run on the twenty second night in Heaven – he knows because he makes scratches on the wall by the door – Castiel is sitting on the porch, carefully studying the devil. He looks at Dean coming up the road and frowns in confusion.

“I don’t understand why you’re carrying a crucifix. You don’t believe in God or in Jesus.”

Dean winces and looks down at the beautiful relic in his hands. “Yeah. Good thing Heaven has everything my heart desires. Or at least, it can fake it.” He sets the crucifix on the ground in front of the house and stands staring at it. It truly amazes him sometimes how many personal taboos he has left.

“What does your heart desire?” Castiel asks in his impossibly serious way, and Dean almost laughs.

“Macaroni pictures.”

“It’s a popular culture reference, isn’t it?”

“Don’t mind it. You know, Cas, you might not want to be here for this.”

Castiel walks off the porch and stands next to him, looking down at the crucifix. It’s a beautiful piece, Spanish work and at least two hundred years old, so skillfully detailed that Dean can see the sad lines around Christ’s mouth. It looks grossly out of place in the dust on the outskirts of a small town.

Dean is a non-believer but he’s been raised a respectful man. He raises his foot and stomps down on the crucifix.

“Blasphemy,” says Castiel, as if he just figured something out, some puzzling aspect of human behavior, and is proud of himself. Dean spits on the crucifix. “Dean, you’re guilty of a hundred sins. Do you think blasphemy is going to tip the balance?”

Dean raises his face up to the sky but no clouds congregate and no lightning strikes down to plunge him into Hell. He waits and waits. “It was worth a shot. It’s not like I can kill somebody in here. And I figured, Ash already has drinking and fornication covered and he’s still here.” He considers the relic at his feet. “I have a lighter and some acid in the car.”

Castiel picks up the crucifix, wipes it carefully with his sleeve and hides it inside his trench coat. “The judgment is final,” he says. “But I understand you miss Sam, so I won’t be angry with you.”

“Cas, I need to get out of here. Back down to earth or all the way to Hell but I can’t leave Sam there. And Heaven sucks anyway.”

“It only sucks, as you put it, because you want it to.”

Dean turns to face him. “My little brother’s in Hell, getting his guts ripped out on a daily basis. And I’m supposed to, what, eat my own weight in ice cream up here and hang out with John Wayne?”

Castiel stares back at him and waits. “Do you want an answer, Dean?” he says finally.

“No. Look, is there any sort of, any way for me to leave at least temporarily, so I could get Sam out? I’ll figure out the rest from there.”

“You always seem to believe that you can ‘figure out’ anything.” Dean shrugs in response to that. “It’s nice to have faith.”

“Cas…”

“I don’t believe there’s a way but I’ll make inquiries for you.” And just like that, with a rustle of feathers, he’s gone before Dean can open his mouth to at least say ‘thank you’.

When Dean is here, the time of the day reluctantly changes for him, sometimes getting stuck on a certain hour for too long, sometimes changing too rapidly or in little jerks. Now Dean watches the dusk settle before his eyes, as if someone stirred a few drops of ink into the air. Phantom lights appear in the town streets once again.

The sun settles too fast behind the hill and for a minute casts a huge shadow of the devil at Dean’s feet.

The “ghosts” are particularly active this evening: as Dean walks slowly down the hallway, he can hear footsteps echoing his own in a parallel hallway, and someone’s dragging a hand against the wall, like Sammy used to do. He inevitably left dark lines on wallpaper if they stayed in a house long enough. The house in Bisbee is too small to have two hallways but it’s not as if ghosts ever care about physical dimensions. Dean thinks it’s his own memories of the thousand and one haunted houses he’s seen in his lifetime that are creating the effect. If he stops fighting Heaven, he’ll have Sammy from this place – six years old and like real, to distract him while the original burns in Hell.

Desperation is like a zombie trapped underneath the floorboards, scratching and moaning just barely on the threshold of Dean’s hearing. If he pays too close attention to it, it will bust out, and how is that gonna help anybody?

Dean showers, then turns off all the lights in the house and crawls under the blankets. For a few minutes it’s quiet, until a floorboard creaks in the hallway, as if someone is standing right outside the bedroom door.

“Sam?”

As Dean lies in bed, waiting for – thankfully dreamless – sleep to come, he imagines that the air smells of snakes, and just out of the corner of his eye, he can see shed skin of a rattlesnake laid out on the windowsill. It wasn’t there last time Dean was in the bedroom but at that point, he’s too sleepy to care. Sam used to do that after he and Dean went hunting for “interesting things” in the desert: he spread the trophies all over the house and saved the best one for Dad’s room. Dean looks from under half-closed eyelids at the delicate thing, dry and torn and fluttering in the breeze from the open window.

He blinks, and when he opens his eyes again, Sammy is on the side of their bed, looking at him.

 _I know,_ Dean would say if only he could muster that much muscle control, _Hell has you now and you’re almost a demon yourself. I know you came to me as a rattlesnake and slipped your skin, and now I have to wait for a year and one day if I want to have you back, day and night. But I will lose patience in a year and burn your skin, and then, and then—_

He read it in some book sometime, and as usual, he forgot the ending. He always forgets the endings.

Sammy is six, with crazy hair and wearing his favorite pajamas with stars arranged in real constellations. Dean eyes him and keeps his mouth shut, too tired to chase away the ghost. Without a single word, Sammy crawls in the bed and on top of Dean, locks his knees around Dean’s ribcage and rubs his nose under Dean’s chin. He smells of snakes and desert and underneath that, of little brother. Dean tries to blink again but his eyes stay closed this time. Sammy smacks slobbery kisses on his cheeks and forehead – he’s always been a sop like that until he learned to keep excessive tenderness in check, only Dean suspects that he still has the impulse to jump people and drown them in saliva.

He runs his hand over the kid’s back in circles, rubbing him to sleep.

“Dean.” The voice is wrong, so wrong for a six year old boy, and Dean opens his eyes…

…to stare in the pale, bloodless face of his thirty one year old brother with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead – the same as he looks in Dean’s nightmares about Highway 42. He has a bruise on his cheekbone, his hair is mated with blood and the startled expression on his face probably matches Dean’s own. Then he flickers and is gone from the room, leaving behind a stronger smell of sun-heated snakeskin.

Dean sits up in bed, his heart drumming in his throat, all traces of sleep gone.  
“Sammy?”

He picks up a gun from the nightstand and makes a round of the house, grabbing a salt container from the kitchen on his way. But now that he’s fully awake and not in the mood for any of Heaven’s shit, it’s just an empty old house with leaky faucets but no extra hallways and no little brother, six years old or grown up, creeping behind the walls.

Dean stands in the hallway for a while, rubbing a hand against his face and thinking of Sam, of the way his weight increased tenfold as soon as Dean’s brain registered the grown-up version, of the blood and bruises and pale skin.

When he returns to the bedroom, the snakeskin is gone from the windowsill but there’re two figures standing by the bed.

Dean catches himself the last second and takes his finger off the trigger before he shoots anyone. “Jesus Christ!” The angels – Barnael and another one, with a _Semper Fidelis_ tattoo on his forearm – twitch but don’t object like Castiel would. “You guys need to learn how to knock.”

The angels regard him in silence. Dean keeps the gun’s muzzle pointed at the floor but doesn’t put the safety on – out of old habit created by one too many run-ins with angels. The fuckers are downright creepy and, as far as Dean’s experience shows, usually far from friendly.

Finally, Barnael-the-Salesman takes a step forward. “Dean Winchester,” he says, “we would like to ask you about the Little Brother who gives you strength and keeps you safe. We wish to know more about him.”

 

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000h0bp/)

****

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000edbp/)

**II.**

_\- I stood for long before the Hell’s gates, heavy  
But in the Hell all was just dark and calm.  
Oh, even Devil doesn’t need my levy  
Where shall I come?_  
(Anna Akhmatova)

 

This is a true story, Sam Winchester.

There once was meant to be but never will be the greatest diplomat of all times with a Heaven-assigned destiny of establishing world peace and saving humanity from further self-destruction, at least for the next two centuries. (It was actually all an elaborate scheme by Hell but never mind that.) Because he never came to exist he has no name, but nevertheless, he was to become the Man.

The Man was to be a product of a sacred union between William Aberdeen and Melissa Stoner – soulmates bred through eight generations so that they could one day find each other in San Antonio, Texas. It was written in the stars, but the said writing now carries even less significance than “I love Nicole” that someone scribbled on a supporting column of I-37 in San Antonio. The guy, at least, still loves Nicole.

Unfortunately for the Man and humanity (and Hell, but never mind that), William Aberdeen, back in his boyhood known as Billy “The Armpit”, was a dick. Unfortunately for Billy, he lived next door to a bespectacled, freakishly tall girl named Jessica Moore, or Jess, who had a cat named Honey-Bunny.

Are you with me so far? Let’s recap: we have the Man, son of Billy “The Armpit”, and Honey-Bunny the cat, a companion of Jess Moore.

One day when Billy was twelve, he thought it would be funny to kick Honey-Bunny in her soft belly and across the lawn. Fortunately, the cat was fine, which is more than can be said for Billy. Jess Moore, who was also twelve at the time, had witnessed the abuse of her beloved companion, picked up a rake from the lawn and rammed Billy in the groin with the blunt end. As a result, Billy sustained injuries which necessitated amputation of his right testicle.

Years later, Billy met Melissa, and they felt immediately attracted to each other. But the single testicle freaked Melissa the fuck out and led to a break up. Both parties moved to different ends of the country to never speak again and to find only moderate satisfaction in their respective love lives. The Man was never to be.

The moral of the story is: be nice to animals.

(And Jess Moore is cursed for always and eternity to carry with her the unborn savior of humanity.)

****

“Dead, huh? Okay. I’ll look into it. Thanks for the tip, Danny.”

Bobby hangs up the phone and stares at it as it sits on the wall among its many friends, now silent. He got the news of John Winchester’s death – once. He got the news of Sam and Dean Winchester’s death – again and again and again and then one more time until he lost count. The news turned out to be true half the time, which is already too many. Not that Bobby isn’t grateful.

Some people will sneeze at the wrong moment and are gone forever. Others won’t stay in the ground for anything.

Bobby dials the seven phones that Sam and Dean have between them but gets no answer on any of them. He leaves a couple of messages and punches in another number from memory. “Matt? It’s Bobby Singer. Say, could you keep an eye out for a car for me? ’67 Chevy Impala, black, plate numbers… Ready?”

The Impala turns up the next day in an impound lot in Wisconsin, has been there for four days apparently, and when Bobby hears the words spoken over the phone, his stomach drops. He makes the trip himself, across Minnesota and practically the entire Wisconsin to find the familiar car sitting in the lot with Sam’s jacket bunched up on the front seat and Dean’s current book jammed under that same seat – hell knows why he keeps hiding them because it’s not like Sam hasn’t noticed. It feels like he’s going through the Winchesters’ room, digging up fake IDs, random weaponry stashed away in strange places, first aid supplies, maps, gum, Dean’s cigarettes and a pair of lacy black underwear of indeterminate ownership, large enough for one of the boys, which Bobby finds disturbing whether it belongs to one of them or an unknown Valkyrie of their size. Everything looks perfectly normal as though they left the car with nothing but the usual weapons they carry.

Bobby tows the Impala back to his place, puts it in the garage and spreads a request for information through the extensive verbal communication network that hunters keep. Nothing solid comes back, though the word “zombies” as well as the names of Walt Bridges and Roy Corry are a constant. He calls in a few favors, sends out another couple of requests and waits for Sam and Dean to show up on his porch again.

****

Having visited Hell before, Sam knows the importance of the Happy Place. It sounds silly, like something a therapist would tell a neurotic soccer mom to find when her five kids are being bratty, but if you have one strong in your head, it’s one place where Hell can’t follow.

Sam wakes up with a start on a slope of a bone splinter mountain and becomes aware of a lesser demon gnawing on his ankle – something he missed in his sleep because he already hurts all over anyway. Sam kicks it in the face a couple of times and watches it tumble downhill.

Jessica stirs next to him, rolls over and carefully pokes at her healed throat. “You know, I thought at first you just had a sick sense of humor, but finding a happy place actually helped.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. Listen, was yours weird?”

Jessica blinks at him. “I didn’t pick a weird place if that’s what you’re asking. I just thought of my family’s home. Why, what did you imagine?”

Sam composes a lie in his head, catches himself and tastes blood. It’s no wonder, really: he never realized how deeply the habit ran. “I thought of this one house we used to rent in Arizona.” He falls silent and remembers walking through the hallways and the way it made him feel – like Dean was just around the corner. “My brother was ten and I was six. I dreamed that he was asleep and that I got into our bed. I hugged him, and then he woke up, and suddenly we were adults again.” He remembers the look on Dean’s face, of shock and crazy hope. The little boy in bed was a memory, a bodiless, ghostly apparition, but that Dean was real and Sam was crushing his ribs.

“Okay.”

“I don’t know, Jess, it was just… It felt like Dean.”

“Well… But it was still a good dream, wasn’t it?”

Sam’s back still has the memory of Dean’s palm imprinted on it. “I suppose.”

Slowly, taking care not to disturb any muscles that still might be torn, he and Jessica get off the ground. The diplomat in the bag that never leaves her shoulder wakes up and starts wailing about traitors and useless whores again. Sam wonders what’ll happen if he puts his hands inside and throttles the unrealized hope of humankind. Will it actually die if anyone but Jessica tries?

They pick a random direction and start walking because it never pays to sit in one place in Hell: too many things gather around for a bite. If Sam ever gets them out of here, he means to sit down and not move further than the refrigerator and the bathroom for two weeks. His stomach gives a pitiful wail at the thought of the refrigerator, and Sam can feel himself being drawn into a loop of food fantasies.

“So,” he says, just to stop it. Food fantasies are the plague of his time in Hell – vivid and persistent enough to keep him awake for insane hours, maddening and dissatisfying. “You’ll never believe who my soulmate turned out to be.”

Jess gives him an amused smile, and only then Sam realizes that perhaps he’s being an ass, telling his ex-girlfriend about a soulmate who isn’t her. “You’re thinking about food again, aren’t you?” she says.

“I’m trying not to. Sorry, Jess, I didn’t think… I have no brains, obviously.”

“In more than one way. Nah, it’s okay. Tell me.”

“Dean, apparently.”

It takes her a moment to process but then she laughs – a full-throated, unapologetic laugh that made Sam notice her in the first place, back in Stanford, and that he missed sorely. “Gross, Winchester, you kinky bastard! Really?”

“Yup. Sucks, right? Not only is my soulmate a man and related to me, but more importantly, he’s a dick.” Who would ever want to hook up with Dean, having known him for more than a night? He’s rude, obnoxious and obsessed with his car. He likes guns and old Westerns and pretends he hadn’t lived his whole life wishing he could be a real cowboy, though he’s really transparent. He’ll do anything to leave an impression and then he gets surprised that someone remembers him, thinks and talks about him or knows all his favorite foods and movies. He’s possibly the best person in the world, and Sam would die for him all over again.

Wait, what? How did that thought start?

“How’d you even find out?” Jessica says.

“This isn’t the first time I died.”

She rolls her eyes dramatically. “I don’t even know why I hang out with you.”

There are more twisted black trees looming on the horizon, surrounded by bone-dry desert, so Sam marks them as destination and walks a little faster, having found a goal.  
They stay quiet for a long while. The first time Sam broke through uncomfortable silences with Jessica was a month after they met: they were driving to Oregon and couldn’t find enough topics to yack about for hours in the car. They fidgeted, got over it and the quiet was never a problem again. The thing in her bag, though, seemingly takes their silence as a clue to get louder.

“You disgusting, wretched whore! You miserable excuse for a woman! Do you even know what you’ve done to the world, you cursed bitch?”

“Okay.” Sam stops and reaches for the bag. “Let me try and break its neck for you. It might work if I do it.”

She opens the bag’s flap, and when Sam peers inside, the ugliest, most hateful pair of eyes he’s ever seen looks back at him. The cadaver – the size of a baby, only old and shriveled and with oversized head – opens its mouth and starts its wordless shrieking again.

“Jesus.” Sam yanks the thing out of the bag and it dangles from his grip, thin legs beating in the air, yellowed nails raking through his forearm. He breaks its neck as Jessica looks away.

For the first time since Jessica found him, it’s quiet. Sam holds the dead creature in the air, unsure of what to do with it and whether he should try and find some salt around. By the look on Jessica’s face, she hasn’t had a minute of quiet in, well, a couple of centuries.

“Wow,” she says. “I mean… Thanks, Sam, you’re my hero or something. I’m not even kidding.”

Since there’s no salt to be found, they bury the cadaver – face down, Sam insists – under the nearest tree and continue on their way. They barely manage to walk twenty feet before something with six legs is under the tree and digging up the grave. Within an hour, the diplomat grows back inside Jessica’s bag like a marsupial in a pouch and starts its screeching again.

“Thanks for trying.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Without either one of them really noticing, the dirt and debris under their feet turn into a road. It’s old, with poisonous plants peeking out from cracks in the asphalt and trying to grab their ankles. The shoulder is overgrown with dead fingers like wild grasses, and Sam and Jessica move closer together and towards the center to avoid their grasp. The road looks vaguely familiar to Sam, like a nightmarish version of any state highway in North America.

Sam and Jess exchange questioning looks but shrug and keep walking. They both have approximately an hour before torture starts, and Sam’s heart is picking up pace from the mere thought. Judging by the way Jessica’s hand clutches the strap of her bag, her own thoughts are running along the same tracks. Between that and the food fantasies that not even fear can trample down – _a plate of golden fries with a side of grilled mushrooms and sliced pickles, and maybe a glass of beer_ – Sam really can’t be bothered with the old road and doesn’t notice the crossroads until they’re standing in it.

Sam’s whole body jerks with some kind of muscle memory and he stops dead in the middle. Jessica makes another few steps before she notices and turns around.

“What is it?”

“Shit.” Sam turns on the spot – once, twice, and suddenly he can’t tell one direction from the other and he’s forgotten which way they were heading. He feels bile rise in his throat, sharp and bitter. “This is where… This place…” The crossroads itself is paved, so Sam stares at each of the corners in turn and tries to guess where he and Dean are buried. “We died here,” he says. “Dean and I. They thought we were some sort of zombies and left us at the crossroads so we wouldn’t find our way out.” _And it worked,_ he doesn’t add.

“Sam?”

“What?” When he turns to look, Jessica flickers before his eyes, burns blooming across her skin, hair melting and disappearing. The hope of mankind in her bag hiccups and shuts up.

“Something’s wrong,” she says. Her lips blacken and peel up from her teeth. “Why are you looking at me like that?” She flickers again and is gone the next moment, leaving behind the nauseatingly-sweet smell of burnt bone and the bag that falls to the ground, unsupported. The diplomat resumes his wailing at three times the normal volume.

“Jess?” Sam spins in place but every direction still looks exactly the same. “Jessica!” He does not know where he came from or which way he was going, or how to get off the crossroads without ending up in the center again. He tries to count roads and suspects there’re four but he keeps losing count. For miles and miles around, there’s no one but him and the Man.

****

Little Brother does not approve of those who enter without knocking, nor does he approve of those who creep around in the shadow and burst out of closets in a flurry of feathers.

Little Brother says, live and let live.

Little Brother does not smite but makes a fearsome bitch face.

Little Brother does not have horns. Those are not horns. It’s a crescent moon rising out of his hair, for he owns the moon and owns the night. Fuck knows what else he might be hiding in that hair.

Little Brother is awesome.

****

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000f5tz/)

 

It’s their third night, and Dean already has six angels – loyal to the point of frightening, full of rapture and more passionate than any religious fanatic Dean has ever laid eyes on. In every human, there is a worm of free will, planted by either the Devil or stupid chance and evolution. The angels, Dean figured, mostly don’t have free will and only pick it up like an infection, the way Castiel did.

They trail out and onto the porch one after another, bow to the wire-and-tubing fetish and only then disappear: one of the few rules Dean laid down on behalf of the Little Brother is that you don’t pop in and out of the house as you please.

“Thank you, Dean Winchester,” says Barnael, coming out last. “You have given us new hope.”

Dean gives him a two-fingered wave that he invented, something between a blessing and a victory sign. Barnael bows to Little Brother and disappears.

Whether it’s the angels’ presence that had a stabilizing effect or perhaps Dean has been here long enough to let the place settle around him, but time is beginning to function more or less normally. Dean thought it would be a relief when the sun stops plunging behind the horizon, but now that it happened, he’s irritated. What if he forgets after a while, what if everything gets so normal around him that he can’t remember that he’s in Heaven by himself? Then one day a fake Sam might walk through the door, and what if Dean can’t remember where the real one is? Ash listened to those concerns and told him to lay off whatever he’s smoking because it’s making him paranoid.

He watches the dusk thicken and waits for the phantom lights to appear in town. When they start their slow crawl down the streets, Dean gives a nod to the devil – _Little Brother,_ he corrects himself – and walks back into the house.

“Dean, what are you doing?” says Castiel who is standing practically nose to nose with him, though he wasn’t there the previous moment.

“Goddammit!” Dean jumps and hits his shoulder in the narrow hallway. “Cas, haven’t we talked about this?”

Castiel fixes him with an unblinking stare and doesn’t move, from which Dean figures that he’s probably pissed. “You have created an abomination, a cult.” He spits the last word out forcefully, as something revolting that he hates having in his mouth for one moment longer. “My brothers and sisters are confused and lost without guidance, and you fashioned for them a pagan god out of Sam and a plastic fetish.”

Dean wonders if there might be smiting in the nearest future. Carefully, as if he’s trying to step around an angry rattlesnake, he rounds Castiel and walks backwards into the kitchen. Castiel hesitates but follows him and sits down at the table when offered. Dean opens a beer for him but gets a glare, so he leaves the bottle on the table and opens one for himself.

“Look, don’t smite me yet, alright? Just listen.” Castiel sets his shoulders even straighter, which didn’t seem possible, but otherwise remains motionless. “They feel abandoned by God and they want a new faith, so I’m just giving them one. I’m not pushing anybody.”

“You created an underground cult of your brother—”

“Not of Sam, just of Little Brother.”

“Be quiet.” Dean bites his tongue out of precaution. Castiel looks the way he did during their initial meeting – huge, indestructible and inhuman, and Dean keeps waiting for a pair of enormous wings to unfold from his shoulders. He looks like an Angel of the Lord. “What you’re doing is worse than any crime humanity has ever managed. It’s worse than you can comprehend. You’re creating a split among angels that could result in a new celestial war.”

It’s fully dark now, and somewhere in the house, the ghost of Sammy begins its roaming. They both hear a shower curtain being moved in the bathroom and glance quickly that way. Dean mentally thanks his brother for the distraction.

“I preach peaceful worship, Cas. I’ll make sure they don’t start a war and no one gets hurt.”

“You are, as you tend to put it, full of shit, Dean, and you know it. You can’t control them. You have created an abomination of the worst kind in the midst of Heaven – a pagan god.”

“Come on, those pagans aren’t so bad.”

“I recall that several of them have attempted to eat you over the years.”

Dean takes a swallow of his beer while he’s trying to think of an answer, and it’s a huge relief that Castiel, after a moment of hesitation, follows his example. “I’m not inventing Little Brother that way. No blood sacrifices, nothing like that.”

“Little Brother is no longer yours to control. They’ve embraced him, and he’s their god now. You, Dean, are a false prophet in Heaven. I ought to smite you on the spot for that.”

Dean rubs a hand against his face. “Go right the fuck ahead. Why are you still talking to me?” He braces himself and wonders if he’s about to become a cloud of ectoplasm – or whatever souls are made of – but a brief flicker of embarrassment on Castiel’s face tells him he chose the right tactic.

“You’re a grieving man,” says Castiel. “You’re mad with grief for your brother, and you’re doing this to be expelled from Heaven.”

“Motivation is everything, right?”

“What are you planning to do if you’re cast down from Heaven?”

Dean’s heart gives a little jump at those words. Floorboards creak in the non-existent hallway behind the wall and a door moans on ungreased hinges somewhere, as if the ghost heard, too, and is also full of hope. “Are you saying I can actually get kicked out for this?”

“You can get destroyed for this, although it’s more likely that you’ll get expelled. Then you’ll be a spirit wandering the Earth, and your brother will still be in Hell.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.”

“I remember you using that expression to deceive Jimmy Novak.”

“Whatever. Look, Cas, one step at a time. Earth is still a lot better than Heaven: at least it’s one level closer to Hell. If I’m lucky, maybe you guys will throw my ass straight down to Hell, and then Sam and I will figure it out from there.”

“There you are with figuring things out again.”

Subconsciously, Dean feels that the storm passed for now. He puts his feet up on the table and raises the bottle in a silent salute to Castiel before taking another sip. Castiel tilts his head. They sit quietly for a while, cooling down and listening to the little noises in the house.

“I have to get to him, Cas,” Dean says finally. “I’m sorry, man. I’ll be careful with what I say, honest.”

“I sometimes envy your relationship with Sam. It is very close.” Dean shrugs in response. “Is it because of the social vacuum you were raised in?”

“Too many big words for me, Cas. It is what it is.”

“I recall that Victor Henricksen used to say that if he were to run a campaign for parenting licenses, you and Sam would be his poster boys.” Castiel squints myopically at the ceiling and the heaven beyond. Dean has suspected for some time that his vessel is in a bad need of glasses, which Castiel in his angelic ignorance fails to recognize. “I have been reading the works of Sigmund Freud, particularly his theories on parental influence and the uncanny quality of female genitalia—”

Dean chokes on the beer. “No. Seriously, put Freud down.”

“Why? His theories about castration complex are highly enlightening.”

“Cas, trust me: Freud doesn’t have the answers to human nature. Just… no.” It figures that of all the books Castiel could have picked up he went with Freud. “What’s so strange anyway about wanting to get my brother out of Hell?”

“The fact itself isn’t strange. The lengths to which you are willing to go are, such as forming a pagan cult in Heaven.” He is starting to get a maniacal glow in his eyes again, so Dean quickly shoves a fresh beer into his hand. Castiel stares at it in puzzlement.

“That’s for the road,” Dean says. “Can we talk about this tomorrow? I’d like to go to sleep now.”

Castiel disappears without another word, in the time it takes Dean to blink. He takes the bottle with him.

Dean doesn’t bother to turn on the lights in the house. A slow breeze picks up outside and blows through the open windows – it carries dust but also the smells of the desert. Dean read somewhere a long time ago that there’re three types of people defined by the longings in their heart – for the mountains, for the ocean and for the desert, though the woods should probably be on that list, too. The desert is where Dean belongs. Sam has always been the ocean type of guy, which is probably part of the reason he likes California so much.

It’s been two days since that time he saw his Sam, however that happened, and Dean did everything short of turning himself inside out to repeat the encounter. He relaxed and let the house replay its memories and he got exactly that – memories. He found some snakeskin and laid it out on the windowsill and got squat. He spent hours pretending to be asleep and he chased the ghost of Sam around the house, but nothing like what happened that one night was ever repeated again.

Slowly – just in case he might frighten something away – Dean peels off his clothes, gets under the blankets and tries to relax. He listens to the sounds the desert makes at night and the distant rumble of non-existent engines carrying up from the town. In the living room, the TV switches on like it does sometimes. Dean recognizes _Zita and Gita_ with voice-over translation and the high-pitched singing in the native language, tries to remember how long it’s been since he and Sammy watched it and can’t. He can see Sammy in his mind: a plump boy frozen in front of the screen, grinning at the girl who dances barefoot on the rim of a city fountain. They were living in New York then, hanging out every afternoon with an old Punjabi lady next door who was incessantly mending clothes. She never locked her front door and only gave them a nod whenever they walked in, and then she’d start translating her current drama in a deep, heavily accented voice. It’s that voice that Dean hears from the living room now.

 _Zita and Gita_ was bullshit, Dean vaguely recalls, and didn’t someone get strangled by getting his tie caught in a ceiling fan in there? Sammy was cautious of those fans for years, before Dean figured out the reason. He can swear it was a ridiculous, soppy story, though he barely remembers any of it. But he enjoyed the urban wilderness of Indian dramas, and Sammy always liked them so much when he was little, for his own unknown reasons.

TV lights flutter on the hallway wall that Dean can see through the door, but if he gets up, the set will switch off. He knows because he tried. “Sammy,” he says. “Sam, come on, dude. Come over here.” He falls asleep thinking of dancing girls that sing to him in high voices about separated siblings.

(Though they might have been complaining about the intolerable prices of mangos in New Delhi because it’s not as if the songs are ever translated, but dammit, Dean will think whatever he likes.)

****

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000cy99/)

 

**III.**

_\- …And it was so beautiful that God came down from Heaven. He said to me, “Marilyn Manson, we’re no longer gonna spell the word ‘God’ G-O-D.”_ (Marilyn Manson)

 

This is a true story, you guys. My friend’s in a sorority with one of the girls this happened to.

This one chick, Jennifer, used to be a student here, in the Anthropology Department. She had a boyfriend, and he was a nutjob, like, one of those serial killers from _America’s Most Wanted,_ I swear to God, only Jennifer didn’t know this. They lived over there, across the street. You see those windows on the second floor?

On Halloween night nine years ago, the guy just snapped, went psycho out of the blue, killed his girlfriend and torched the place. No, this is only, like, the tip of an iceberg.

Anyways, so these girls that my friend is friends with heard the story and decided to summon Jennifer’s spirit on the anniversary of her death. One of them has a brother who’s a cop here, or something, so they found the records, what her last name was and where she was buried. I don’t know, okay, my friend didn’t tell me because the girl didn’t tell her.

So they went to the cemetery and set up this honest-to-God ritual over her grave exactly at midnight. They found this ritual in some old book, right? Shut up, this is totally true! I’m not even kidding you, this one girl had to take an academic leave because she had a mental breakdown.

They did this ritual, and they were, like, ‘Jennifer, come back to the world of the living! Rise from your grave and tell us your story!’ They had an Ouija board with them and everything, to talk to this girl. And nothing happened, right, so they wait and wait, and they were packing their stuff and laughing about it all. And then Jennifer BURST OUT OF HER GRAVE! She was a full-on burnt skeleton and she was wrapped in this white sheet, all dirty and falling apart. And the girls were totally freaking out, like, trying to run and stuff. Jennifer was like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got to go!’ She grabbed this one girl’s sweater and just took off, and no one ever saw her again.

This is all true, by the way.

****

There’s no getting off the crossroads. Not even Sam’s demons will come for him here. Hell has forgotten about him. Every once in a while, small ugly things will come and dig at the corners of the crossroads and stare at Sam with their red eyes but none ever get in, just like Sam can’t get out. He tried walking but ended up back on Highway 42 every single time. He still can’t tell one direction from the other. For twenty five hours, he’s been mostly sitting, lying or pacing in the middle of the crossroads – hungry, thirsty and half-crazy with boredom of all things. It’s like he found a new, previously undiscovered form of hellish torture. Maybe he can get it named after him.

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000dw3x/)

****

“So where are you heading?”

“South Dakota. But you just take me as far as you’re going, and that’s all right.”

“That’s a long way. You’re on a school break or something?”

“I’m doing some work for my graduate project, working with Native American tribes in the area, all that.”

“Gotcha.”

The trucker has been trying to sneak a look at her face and Jessica is tugging her hood and a Stanford Cardinal cap lower every two minutes like an obsessive-compulsive freak. She doesn’t have her hair back yet to hide behind – it’s the slowest to grow back, so far. Her skin mostly grew back but is covered in burns and blisters. She figured it’ll take another five pounds of fresh meat to have it back to normal, and who knows how much to maintain it.

The trucker turns on the music, bored with the monotonous scenery. Jessica studies her nails. So this must be what it was like for Sam back then – to carry a secret so huge, so impossible that it sits and rots in the belly and taints every word that comes out. There is absolutely no way not to lie in this position.

 _Liar, liar, pants on fire,_ Jessica tells herself and sighs, running her tongue over her gums. They’re so dry her tongue sticks.

She’s been topside for three days now, having woken up as a burnt corpse with an almost insatiable desire for fresh meat. Another day, Jessica would have found it funny: it’s a full-blown zombie story that’s likely to circulate the Stanford campus for the next decade. It isn’t funny in the least, though, from the zombie’s perspective. She was the one who had to climb to a second story of a sorority house to get clothes, and once inside, she wanted meat so badly it drove her to tears – rather, it would have, if she still had intact tear ducts. Hiccupping and sobbing, bent in half with stomach cramps, Jessica found the kitchen and ate six pounds of uncooked ribs right in front of the fridge. She regained her composure enough after that to at least toss the bones, resisted the urge to write a note of apology and moved to the next house. She got caught in one, though the guy fainted at the sight of her. Another day, Jessica would’ve been offended. But things have changed, and she just wanted to peel the meat from his ribs with her teeth. Thank goodness she was more or less sated at that point.

She knows that almost fifteen pounds of raw meat should have her puking out her guts, and yet she’s never ate anything better in her life. By the end of that first night, Jessica’s muscles and most of her skin grew back. She managed not to eat anyone and is very proud of herself for that.

She’s fairly sure that she’s still Jessica Moore from San Antonio, Texas, a former anthropology student at Stanford University who fucked with world peace. If she ever sees Sam again, she’s not going to tell him about the lingering doubts. He apparently hunts things like her.

Sam mentioned a guy named Bobby, someone who knows about the supernatural, and the name stuck in Jessica’s memory. It buzzes and buzzes around in her head: Bobby-Bobby-Bobby. He lives in South Dakota, somewhere around Sioux Falls, and he owns a salvage yard. Hopefully, the world still has phone books around so she can play Terminator.

****

There is a shitload of gods, and Dean Winchester is a prophet of one. He who owns the night is reborn every hundred years in a new body, and this century, it is the body of Dean’s brother. Have faith in him, and he’ll give you strength in the darkest hour, cover your back in a fight and drink all the milk in the fridge. He’ll worship you like you worship him.

Little Brother is alive and well and living in Hell.

****

Dean is taking a shower when a gust of wind more like a small tornado passes through the entire house, banging doors and rattling windows in their frames. Dean grabs a wall to steady himself, thinking for a brief moment that there is going to be an earthquake, but then everything’s quiet again. The only sign that anything happened at all is a patch of fine sand and desert dust blown under the bathroom door. Dean steps in it and feels its unnatural heat with the sole of his foot.

It occurs to him that he should have put on something more than a towel – in case this is the moment of judgment he’s been awaiting, and really, Dean would like to look more presentable if he’s about to get his ass blasted out of existence. But he’s already out of the bathroom and it’s too late, and nobody jumps him anyway.

All surfaces in the house are covered with a fine layer of red dust that doesn’t belong in this part of Arizona. Tiny grains of sand sting his bare feet as he slowly walks down the hallway.

“Angels? What’re you guys up to? Cas?”

Nobody answers him. The day is bright but the light doesn’t filter well through the dusted window, so there’s a strange, alien sort of illumination in the room. Dean glances outside to find one of his thirteen angels sitting cross-legged on the ground about twenty feet away from the porch. Dean frowns but leaves the investigation for later. On his way to the bedroom, he picks up a knife – doesn’t trust his gun after the blast of indoors sandstorm – and a container of salt.

Sam is in their old bed, hogging all the covers. Dean blinks and shakes his head furiously but Sam is still there – breathing despite a hole in his forehead, and reeking of earth, blood and sweat so strongly that Dean can smell him from the door. An involuntary shudder goes through him as Sam smacks his lips in his sleep, shifts his shoulders and buries his face in the pillow, exposing a bigger hole in the back of his skull.

There’s a sharp knock on the door, three times, perfectly spaced out like only the angels knock. Dean turns half-way so that he would still be able to see Sam on the periphery, just to make sure.

“You look like shit,” he says to Barnael who is now standing in the dark hallway. Dean can see him swaying on his feet, and his hair is visibly singed.

“Hell is… difficult to penetrate.” The angel looks at Sam’s sleeping form and straightens up, squaring his shoulders and raising his chin with a manic gleaming in his eyes that stirs worry in Dean. “We restored him, the current reincarnation of Little Brother. We will now worship.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Dean touches his own forehead where the gunshot wound is on Sam’s.

“He has Hell’s penance wounds. He’ll be healed shortly by Heaven’s benevolent atmosphere.”

Dean feels like the world is spinning and he has to put his hand surreptitiously on the doorframe. He’s starting to get chilly despite the heat as water evaporates from his skin. “So… he’s okay? This is Sam?”

“This is Little Brother in his earthly form. With your leave now, Prophet, we will worship.” He gives Dean a shy smile that looks like it’s governed by the vessel’s muscle memory. “It’s very nice to have a god that’s present, once again.”

“Outside.” The angel nods and disappears from the living room.

For reasons he can’t quite explain to himself and isn’t willing to examine, Dean salts the doorway and the windows – to keep them both in, to keep Heaven out or for old times’ sake. Halfway through it, his hands begin to shake and his knees buckle. It’s a long familiar feeling of having just dropped an enormous load of worry he didn’t realize he was carrying. Dean huffs out a breath and sits down on the bed. That bed seemed like an unmeasured, unconquered territory when they shared it all those years ago. They played wars in it, drew state lines and fought to the first blood over them. There were border patrols of toy soldiers, visas obtained through cookie bribery, single finger foreign invasions that needed to be squashed immediately to prevent the enemy from gloating for the rest of the night. Now there’s only enough room for Sam to rest comfortably. Dean sits on the edge of the bed and finger-invades the narrow strip of land in the crook of Sam’s elbow.

“That’s my territory, Sam,” he says quietly, and as if triggered by his voice, Sam curls towards him, throws an arm around Dean’s thigh and presses his face into it. Dean eyes the hole in his skull and feels his mouth fill with saliva as a precursor to vomiting, but the blood and bits of brain matter are gone from Sam’s hair and the skull stitches itself up as he watches.

“Dean,” Sam mumbles against his leg, his tongue sleep-heavy. “I’m stuck at the crossroads. You won’t believe this: I saw a lion. It was big like a house. Said I was its god. This big-ass lion…” Sam snores, and the rest of the sentence is buried in the fabric of Dean’s towel.

Dean puts his hand on the back of Sam’s neck for grounding, closes his eyes and tries to breathe slowly. His heart accelerates until he can feel crazy pounding in his throat and something twists and twitches in his chest painfully a couple of times. Dean tries to breathe through his nose but can’t get enough air and sits, panting, waiting for the panic attack to pass. Sam hugs his leg like a pillow and sleeps on, oblivious, probably dreaming of his big-ass lions.

There’s a festival of some sort going on at the foot of the hill, down in Bisbee: Dean can hear cheering all the way up here. _Cheese balls._ Sam can’t be moved easily, so Dean crawls between him and the wall and settles down to sleep. Sam growls at the loss of the leg and squashes a pillow to his chest almost menacingly but he calms down when he feels Dean’s body pressed against his back. Dean thinks, _Get off my land,_ and holds on tight.

****

Jessica was a pretty girl once, a proud girl who cultivated her looks because a flat stomach and toned hips are rarely given by nature. It pains her now to have this bubbly, red skin that heals so agonizingly slow. She thinks that if she still had her blond locks and soft lips that didn’t crack and bleed when she smiled, Bobby Singer of Singer Salvage Yard might’ve reacted differently.

But because she looks like her own one-woman zombie apocalypse, Jessica is tied to a chair in a stinky basement, enclosed by a circle of salt that she doesn’t think she can cross. There are suspicious stains on the floor. She is probably lucky to have uttered Sam’s name before she got knocked out, and that might just be the only reason her head is still attached.

Bobby Singer is an unpleasant redneck that chews tobacco and spits it into a condensed milk can. He comes down the stairs half an hour after she woke up, carrying a machete, which puts a serious stain on his character, in Jess’s opinion.

Still, you don’t bitch at a man with a machete. “Hi,” says Jessica. “How are you?”

Bobby sits down on the stairs with a grunt and leaves the weapon next to him, demonstrably laid out so that Jess could appreciate the sharp edge of it. He spits into the can.

“So,” he says.

Jessica sighs. “Mister Singer, is this really necessary? I haven’t done anything to you.”

“Don’t mind the precautions, sweetheart.”

More than the bonds, Jessica hates that he took away her Cardinal cap, revealing the slowly healing scalp covered in fuzz. The ties she gets but must he take away her dignity, too? “Can I have my cap back please?”

He considers it in silence for a moment but gets up and sets the cap back on her head. “Jennifer, right?” he says. “I heard about you. You’re Sam’s girl?”

“Jessica. I’m my own girl.”

“Nothing’s wrong with that.” He sits back down, next to his machete. “What brings you out of your grave, Jessica?”

Of course he has to put it like _that._ “I didn’t mean to,” she says. “Some idiots at Stanford pulled me out. But listen, Sam’s in Hell, he’s stuck at some crossroads and can’t get out.”

Bobby frowns. “Sam’s in Hell? What’s he doing down there again?”

“I don’t know, he never told me straight. Something about letting the Devil out and putting him back in, and something about shooting his grandfather in the head.”

“Where’s Dean?”

“I never saw him. Sam thinks he’s in Heaven.”

Bobby makes a face like he just ate a lemon. “Balls! They’re separated?”

An hour later, Jessica is sitting in the kitchen with a cup of black coffee and a plate of rare steak. The machete is still there, gleaming on the counter – to make sure she doesn’t try anything funny, as Bobby put it – but it’s still a massive progress for just one hour. She makes herself pick up a fork and eats carefully, slowly, though the meat is dripping juices and driving her mad, though it’s intolerable to see one drop fall past her lips. Jessica restrains herself. _Steady, girl, steady, drink some coffee now._ She doesn’t like hers black, craves the sweet and creamy taste instead of this burnt rubber flavor, but she drinks it for the caffeine buzz. One would think that nine years in the grave got rid of that addiction.

Bobby watches her eat and chews his awful tobacco. Jessica won’t hold it against him, just for putting up with her craving for half-raw meat.

“Sam spoke well of you,” he says. “Got drunk off his ass once and sang praises to you. Told me you were a good girl, a smart girl, kind and beautiful, all that. What were you doing in Hell?”

Jessica licks the juice from her lips, takes a long sip of coffee and picks up another strip of meat. Her hands, she notices, look red and feel badly sunburned but the blisters are gone. “It’s complicated. I accidentally fucked with world peace. There was this neighbor’s kid, and he kicked my cat.” Jessica shrugs and licks her fingers surreptitiously.

“A cat lady from Hell,” Bobby says, almost smiling. She shrugs again.

It’s a beautiful morning where he lives, and now that Jessica is done running, it makes her chest ache. The kitchen is drowning in golden light, sun caresses her skin and the radio is playing Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing” quietly – god, she loves that song. It all reminds her of the countless mornings in different kitchens – her parents’ house first in Texas and later in Colorado, hers and Sam’s apartment in Palo Alto and various homes of various friends. She spent her whole life in sunny states, forever stuck in summer.

“I think they died in Wisconsin,” Bobby says, “but I don’t know where. The crossroads makes sense.”

“Sam’s stuck. He can’t get out of there, as if Hell isn’t bad enough.” The plate is empty, and Jess draws her finger along the rim before she notices and stops. “He’s always hungry and he misses his brother awfully.”

Bobby seems to interpret her comment about hunger properly because he digs through his freezer for some waffles. Jessica bites her lip – it doesn’t bleed anymore – and vows to clean his house as a gesture of gratitude later.

“Okay,” says Bobby. “We need to figure out where this crossroads is.”

****

There is a bar in Bisbee – a neon sign, dollar beer, pool table, the works. It’s besieged by long-limbed twisted cacti on three sides, and there isn’t a soul inside like Dean suspected all along. He and Sam sit in the empty room sipping beers that appear if they click their fingers, which amused them both to no end and resulted in a barrage of beer bottles crowding the table.

If they look outside, there’ll be an angel or two visible in the street. They stand in a circle around the bar like they stood around the house earlier – immobile, with the same serene expression on their faces. Sam said, _Shhh, they’re praying,_ when Dean first noticed them and wanted to know what the fuck.

“Little Brother, huh?” says Sam in a tone that suggests Dean will never live it down.

Dean shrugs and sips his beer. “They started it.” If he snaps his fingers on the left hand, he can turn on the jukebox, so he thinks about “Paradise City” hard.

“Nice,” says Sam after he hears the first chords. “Very appropriate, dude.”

Sam dims the lights for the atmosphere, and they sit in the semi-dark listening to the music, with Sam’s fingers drumming out the rhythm on the table. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, bless them or something. They seem happy just staring at you, which, by the way, is starting to get old.”

They both look towards the window. One of the angels is just outside, standing in the middle of a street as translucent phantom cars rush by every few minutes and break over his figure if they happen to hit it.

“Point taken,” says Sam. “What did Cas say? Are we gonna get our asses fried for playing pagan gods and false prophets?”

“I haven’t seen Cas in days. He wasn’t happy last time. He said I’ll get thrown out of Heaven, which was the plan back then, but I don’t think anyone cares much.”

“Hm. Hey, speaking of Cas, can we go see him and Ash?”

Dean grins and gets up, digging for his car keys. “Yeah, come on, we’ll drive there. Ash set up a gate in Minnesota.”

Later, he figures, he’ll make fun of Sam for ending up as a pagan god, like who would ever want to pray to this strange thing? Later, Sam will give him shit for forgetting to dress before going to sleep: Sam is probably scarred for life from waking up next to his naked, towel-draped ass. (Or maybe not so much scarred, but these things that Dean knows about himself and Sam – yeah, let them stay buried.) Later they’ll do all that, after they make sure the other isn’t about to disappear in a puff of smoke.

When they walk outside, the angels are there like a silent guard. Sam gives them a perplexed look but doesn’t acknowledge them otherwise and gets in the car.

“Still shy about your new divinity, Sammy?” Dean says.

“Shut up. This is just getting creepy. Are they gonna follow us everywhere now?”

The angels appear along the road like telephone poles as the drive up the hill and towards the house, towards _axis mundi._ And yeah, Dean thinks, maybe it’s a little creepy but he has Sam back, so he’ll think about it later. Sam frowns and crosses his arms over his chest defensively five minutes into the drive. Every twenty feet – why is it always twenty feet with them anyway? – there’s an angel, and like a mechanical doll, he bends and looks inside the Impala as it drives by. Dean looks in the rear view mirror at the blissfully smiling adepts left in their wade.

“Okay, maybe it is creepy.”

“No shit, Dean. Don’t get me wrong, man, I’m grateful that they pulled me out, but what the hell are we supposed to do with them now?”

Dean thinks of the crossroads, of the two gunshots and the way Sam’s body jerked. He thinks of the final snapshot from his dream where the mud around their bodies was swirling with blood and brain matter. He thinks of _Zita and Gita_ playing in the living room and of the days he believed he’d never see Sam again. A crowd of obsessed angels doesn’t begin to compare. “We’ll figure it out,” he says.

Sam smiles like he knows something, like he’s hiding candy in his pocket and not sharing.

They don’t make it out of Arizona. Where Dean knows it’s supposed to turn into Oregon woods from Sam’s memories, Barnael stands in the middle of the road. Dean gets a nasty sinking sensation in his stomach that only grows stronger as he stops the car and opens the door. Sam gets out, too, and stands behind the open car door as if he’s shielding himself.

“Hey,” says Dean. “So what’s up?”

The angel turns his unblinking gaze to Sam and bows. “It’s an honor, Little Brother.”

Sam looks embarrassed and wary at the same time. “Thanks?”

“Would you mind moving, now that we got the ritualistic greeting out of the way?” says Dean.

The unblinking gaze turns to him. Dean feels Sam shift uncomfortably on his side of the car. “We’d rather prefer you did not leave this corner of Heaven. We made it proof against foreign invasion, though we haven’t done the same yet for the rest of your Heaven.”

“Foreign invasion,” Dean repeats, just as Sam says, “What, you mean Castiel and Ash?”

Barnael inclines his head. “They might want to interact with you and distract you from your holy existence.”

“My holy _what_?”

“Dude,” says Dean. “Not funny, now move or I’m mowing you down.”

“We’d rather you didn’t leave,” says the angel. The next moment, he’s next to Dean and lifting a hand to his forehead.

Dean blinks and opens his eyes to a TV screen in the familiar living room. A girl is dancing on a rim of a fountain, stomping her bare feet hard against tile, and the whole population of the local slum plays back-up dance troupe for her. The sound is turned down and Dean can hear only the muffled tinkling of music and the particularly high-pitched bits of the song.

“What the fuck?” Sam says.

“Seriously.” Dean walks to the window and draws a curtain aside to look out, with Sam looming behind his shoulder. The ever-present circle of angels is there, their faces reverent and blissful.

“I don’t suppose we have any weapons around that’ll actually work, do we?”

****

Bobby pulls his jacket tight around himself against the chilly air but Jessica finds that she doesn’t mind the cold that much. She’s had enough heat and fire to last her a lifetime. Maybe it’s time to move to Minnesota.

She interrupts the thought there because thinking about the future doesn’t lead her anyplace good: she starts on the subject of zombies and it goes downhill from there.

“Are you sure it’s here?” Bobby calls.

Jessica turns on the spot in the middle of the empty crossroads. No fingers are growing on the shoulder and no malicious little creatures with red eyes lurk in the woods but apart from that, the place looks exactly the same as the one Sam and she found in Hell. “I’m sure. I don’t know what corner though.”

When she turns back to Bobby, he has snowflakes slowly melting in his beard and on the tips of his uncut hair, and he looks so cold with his stringy neck bare above the jacket collar. Jessica takes one look at him and suddenly feels horrible for bringing him here, for making him face this. He eyes the four corners like – and Jessica knows the feeling – he hopes the crossroads would just disappear if he stares long enough. She walks closer and throws her arms around him. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

“What are you talking about, girl?” Bobby says, but he gives her an awkward pat on the back before freeing himself. “Okay, I’m gonna start in the southwest corner, and you grab a shovel and start on another. You know how to dig?”

Jessica dug for earthworms for a fishing trip with her dad, ages and ages ago. “I can try.”

“Just do what I do. And Jessica?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve ever seen a dead body before?”

****

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000b84e/)

 

**IV.**

_\- How do you kill the Devil? With kindness. You know, Devil, I’m gonna put this gun away, and I’m gonna hug you. (99.9 KISW The Rock of Seattle)_

 

Hell’s in Sam like an infection buried deep in the body: it’s not apparent, but it’s in the tension in his shoulders, in the dark circles under his eyes, in the way he won’t sleep at night though Dean taught him how not to dream, and in the way he’s drawn to the fridge. They’re both used to sleeping mostly clothed, but these days Sam barely takes off his boots before going to bed. Dean remembers a similar pain from a long time ago, and it drives him nuts that he can do absolutely nothing to relieve it, that it just has to come out on its own. For all Sam’s talk about sharing and caring back when Dean returned from down under, they never found a cure for Hell more effective than time and bigger problems.

Time is all crooked but bigger problems they have.

From his perch by the window, Dean is doing a fine job keeping an eye on the angels and on Sam at the same time. He watches Sam finish his third ham-and-cucumber sandwich and absent-mindedly lick his fingertips without pausing in his work over a map. The map is his geek love baby, born out of days of painfully taking measurements of the surrounding land and the house’s outside perimeter, completed with legend and drawn to scale. Dean made his own contribution by creatively drawing the angels in their usual positions around the house. It’s a work of art, and too bad it’s just about as useful as art, too.

The angels have tightened the circle two nights ago.

“It’s about ten feet from us and five feet from each other,” he says. Sam nods, twirling his compasses. Dean notices he has one needle stuck in the head of an angel figure – probably on purpose. “Sam, not that it hasn’t been fun, but you know this isn’t gonna work.”

“It will. It’s like chess, I know it, I can see it.” He picks up a stray bit of lettuce from the edge of the map and eats it. “They move as we move but keep those ten-and-five feet distances, so if I can find a dead zone—“

“We’re still stuck. It doesn’t matter how much we move around the yard ‘cause the moment we get within twenty feet of the border, they zap us back here.”

“Then I need to find a dead zone that will get us close enough to the border.” He pinches the bridge of his nose and stares at the map as if trying to burn holes in it. “Somehow. Fuck, I know it’ll work.”

With a sigh, Dean leaves the window and sits on the floor across from Sam, the map between them.

“Be productive or something,” Sam says, taking some measurements. Dean picks at the corners of the map. Sam has all kinds of fancy squares and colorful lines drawn all over it, but the plan is hopeless and Dean can see that right from the start. He already made his point, so he keeps quiet and lets Sam mess around with the compasses.

Dean has these thoughts, these _feelings_ even, a longing for freedom of the open road like he used to get whenever they hit a dry season and stayed in one place for too long, got snowed in or had to lay low for months, running from the FBI. Technically, he and Sam could pretend they’re not prisoners of their own cult. After all, they’re in Heaven, and it appears as though nobody but Cas really gives a crap here about foreign religions. They could fill Bisbee with fake people and enjoy themselves, with only their favorite beer served in every bar and only their favorite songs on every jukebox and radio station. But, he thinks, but he’ll miss _Backstreet Boys._ The thing is, if Dean never again catches an annoying song on the radio and gets it lodged in his brain for the whole day from twenty seconds it took to switch the station, if he never needs to clean his guns, if his shoelace never again snaps and he never catches a cold, then goddammit, it’s one boring afterlife he’s looking at. No one’s supposed to get everything their way.

Besides, he’s getting sick of the place. He wants to get in the car with Sam and drive, just drive forever. They’ll try and murder each other after two days, but at least they’ll have the freedom and the changing scenery.

“We need a physical boundary,” Sam says.

Dean blinks at him. “What?”

“A boundary. If we can get to the border of Arizona with a physical boundary between us and the angels, then they can’t get to us and send us back.”

“Like the Impala.”

Sam stops playing with the compasses and looks up. “Exactly like the Impala.” They both stare at the red border on the map that’s marking the limits of Heaven’s Arizona. “Only…”

“Yeah. They’ll pop into the car.” Dean feels a pulling in his chest, a desire to get on the road so strong it makes his whole body ache.

“Huh,” says Sam. “Unless, of course, there’s no room in the car.”

Dean looks at him like, _You thinking what I’m thinking?_ A corner of Sam’s mouth twitches up.

****

Barnael is trying to comprehend his god to see if this one’s behavior is as ineffable as the old one’s. So far, he’s only moderately mysterious, but Barnael finds himself neither disappointed nor rejoiced. Little Brother is the way he is, and all the angels have to do is believe in him.

He thinks he has the latest behavioral trend figured out: Little Brother and the Prophet are trying to tell their followers something. Twice, or sometimes three times a day, they load their car’s backseat full of chairs, pillows, boxes and lamps, drive out into the desert and build an altar. Then they disassemble it, load everything back in the car out of any apparent order, drive back to the temple and exercise, or eat, or shower, or sleep, or play cards. After several hours, they drive to a different spot in the desert and build a new altar out of the same objects. They take it apart and drive back.

After the second day, the angels tightened their circle around the temple some more and excluded the town of Bisbee from the free-roaming zone – just in case.

Perhaps, Barnael thinks, Little Brother desires an altar but can’t decide on the shape. Once, they built it around a cactus and took longer than usual with disassembly, admiring their work. Perhaps a cactus is the key to perfection. Perhaps it’s a totem Little Brother desires.

That night, the lights don’t go out in the temple until very late. The Prophet and Little Brother drink alcohol and laugh in a manner that Barnael would have found silly if he allowed himself such blasphemous thoughts. An angel sent to investigate reported back that they are drinking tequila, which is made out of cacti, and so Barnael is convinced that a cactus is indeed what they require.

The former humans haven’t learned enough about Heaven yet, so Barnael figures, they are still fearful of pain. While they get drunk and attempt to build a very unstable altar out of a deck of cards, the angels that aren’t worshipping at the moment collect the largest cacti from all parts of the desert, forty two glorious species – for the Prophet and Little Brother display a certain religious awe towards the number and it must be sacred. Barnael prays all night, but between prayers he watches the beautiful totem pole created out of cacti, in the shape of a long-limbed man with a crescent moon rising out of his hair. They infuse the plants with life and make them grow into one another, make them grow into the soil, so that the new totem pole is living and pumping juices. It’s painfully beautiful, and Barnael finds his eyes tearing as he watches the sun rise behind their creation.

In sixty nine years, when it’s time for Little Brother to be restored on Earth in a new body powered by a new soul – for Sam Winchester’s soul is an energy source and certainly not the god itself – the angels will carefully bury Sam and Dean’s souls under the totem and let them be incorporated into it. Then, in time, the new incarnation will reach Heaven and will be buried under the totem once it finishes the hundred years. The growing number of souls concentrated in the cactus will power Little Brother, making him stronger with each new cycle, and it will be oh so beautiful.

The mechanics of a god is an extremely complex subject.

****

“Wow,” says Sam.

“Dude, that’s like your own Touchdown Jesus.” Dean has his hand pressed against his heart like he’s pledging his allegiance to the Cactus.

And it’s, without doubt, the Cactus, with a capital C. It stands on the hillside, looming over Bisbee, its arms raised to the sky, its feet planted firmly in Arizona’s inhospitable soil. It must be three times human height, spiky and vicious and speckled with multicolored flowers here and there.

“Should I thank them?” Sam says.

“The fuckers are keeping us surrounded – what do you wanna thank them for? Let’s go.”

Sam gets into the car. Dean follows, but not before snatching his little devil figure from where it’s hanging above the porch. He puts it on the rearview mirror and shrugs when Sam raises his eyebrows.

The backseat is packed tightly with junk from the house. Sam checks it before closing the door and makes sure nothing bigger than a cat can fit in the back. “Okay,” he says.

“Okay. Just be careful with her.”

Sam moves over and sits sideways with his back leaning uncomfortably against Dean’s shoulder. “Dude, you realize this isn’t your car, right? Your car’s—“ _Oh shit._

“Shit, Sam.” Sam looks over his shoulder and meets Dean’s terrified gaze. “Shit, oh shit, what happened to my car, Sam? Where d’you think she is?”

“Sssh. I’m sure she’s fine.” Sam is far from sure but Dean is looking at him like his kid got abducted. “Time runs faster here, remember? She’s sitting in some impound lot in Wisconsin. Bobby can get her.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. He won’t let anything happen to her.” Sam pats him on the knee, then leans on him and pulls his own legs up, setting one on the windshield and another on the passenger side window. “Let’s do this.”

“Some pimple-faced teenager’s better not be trying to unscrew anything from her.” Dean turns the key and starts the engine. “See an angel – kick him in the face.”

“Got it.”

They start slowly down _axis mundi_ like they’ve been doing for the past three days. The angels stand along the road like lamp posts, always bending to look inside the car and giving that salute Dean invented. Sam nods to a couple but keeps his eyes on the road mostly. Usually they turn off the road and drive into the desert at a random point, and now Dean slows down a few times deliberately like he’s considering it. Sam wonders if the angels even think, if they even have a coherent mental sentence form between their ears concerning the brothers’ intent, or if they simply stand, thoughtless, and spring to action as soon as the car hits that invisible border of allowance. He hopes he’ll have a chance to ask Castiel soon.

The car accelerates, passing the furthest point where they turned before. Sam grips the back of the seat and realizes his palms are slippery with sweat. With the back of his head and his neck and his entire spine he can feel the tension of Dean’s body. Sam pushes back into him and senses movement of Dean’s bicep as he shifts his hands on the wheel. There is so little space left in the car, with all the junk piled up to the ceiling and almost spilling out of the back seat, that Sam feels physically closer to Dean than he has been in a long time. This, he thinks, this must be what those proverbial sardines feel like. It’s kinda nice – being a sardine.

Sam braces his arm against the ceiling for additional anchorage as the Impala hits sixty miles per hour.

It’s so good to be moving again that Sam feels laughter bubbling out of him. Dean’s body shakes with something suspiciously similar.

“Half a mile,” Dean says.

Sam jumps when an angel appears next to the passenger window, flying along with the car without any visible aid of wings, and knocks on the glass urgently. Sam can only stare and clench his teeth, terrified that if he moves a single muscle, he’ll create enough space for the angel to jump inside. He can feel Dean’s grin without looking, like it burns the back of his ears, so happy and radiant. The angel starts slamming his fist into the window, over and over again.

“Bye-bye, Arizona,” Dean says. The Impala hits the border and runs full-speed onto an empty highway in Oregon woods. The angel is blown off like his body hit a barrier.

For the next minute, they drive in silence. Dean slows down a little bit to account for the turns but doesn’t drop below forty five. Sam tries to look back but only sees couch cushions and boxes, and now he’s beginning to wonder if they’re gonna have to keep driving forever. That would suck, a little.

“Did we make it?” says Dean.

“Woo-hoo? I’ve no idea, man. So what, do we keep driving?”

Dean shrugs, which Sam feels in his back. He tilts his head back to see Dean’s face but only gets the same perplexed expression that he’s probably wearing himself. Dean spits out a few strands of Sam’s hair that get into his mouth.

Something catches his eye in the side view mirror, a flickering like distant fire, with splashes of red and orange. Sam stares, frowning, but doesn’t dare move and create an opening between him and Dean. “Hey, Dean, look in your mirror. I think Arizona’s burning.”

Dean stretches his neck and almost misses the next turn, transfixed by the view. “I’ll be damned.”

“Is it, for real?” Before he can think, Sam pushes away from him and moves over to his own mirror. He realizes his mistake the next moment when the space between the two of them suddenly fills with another body.

The car swerves, Dean curses, and Sam drives an elbow into the angel’s face.

“I’d appreciate if you didn’t,” says Castiel, ducking under the second blow. “I just came to say, congratulations, Heaven doesn’t accept you anymore.”

****

For years and years that follow, Sam has this persistent dream, in which he and Dean are falling from enormous height, roaring like two hit Messerschmitts in an old movie entering a death spiral. Everything’s in black and white, and Dean is somehow, despite the air pressure, making meaningful faces at him. _Look at you,_ Sam always thinks, _you’re Batman._

(He asked Castiel once if that’s what it’s always like to fall out of Heaven – with the sound effects of a fifties war movie. Castiel looked horrified and said he wished to never find out.)

****

The year’s first snow followed Jess and Bobby back to South Dakota, and they were met with a white-patched salvage yard. The old house with tire rims nailed to the walls, the junk cars piled up front, the crooked gate – all of it appeared softer sprinkled by snow in the early morning light.

Bobby looked pale on the way back and had that determined air about him like he was just waiting to be alone with his grief. So Jessica volunteered to make Sam and Dean presentable and sent Bobby to build a pyre.

She marvels at these changes in herself sometimes: a kitchen knife cut that bled a little too much used to make her dizzy, and now she stitches her ex-boyfriend's severed head back to his body after he’s been dead for a week, and it’s not that big of a deal. She’s even starting to take pride in her work, trying to make the stitches as neat as possible and do a better job than with Dean. Nine years in Hell will do that to a girl.

She can hear Bobby banging around in the backyard. Poor, poor man. Jessica sighs and brushes a newly-grown blond lock behind her ear.

Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String” starts on the radio, making Jessica smile. She won’t tell Bobby, she won’t tell anyone, but despite sitting in a garage in the middle of nowhere with a wicked curved needle and two horrible corpses, she feels light and happy. It’s okay that she craves raw meat like chocolate – they have both here, on Earth, and she even got a Ghirardelli bar on her way to Bobby’s and it tasted heavenly. Not as good as a piece of uncooked beef but still wonderful. Here, no one screams and swears at her day and night, for the first time in eternity, and no one will come for her in the morning with pliers. There is a huge world outside, intersected with roads, and she can walk out and go anywhere she likes, visit all the places she’s never seen and wander the land for the joy of it. She wants to go back to school even, now that she thinks about it. Maybe Bobby can help with new documents – he seems like the type.

Her family’s in Colorado, and Jess wants to look at them, to maybe just take one peek and then decide if she can show up on their doorstep. Would they ever get over the horror and be glad that she’s back? She can always tell them that she was kidnapped by the mob and her death staged, and for as long as she keeps eating raw meat and doesn’t let anyone listen to her heartbeat, she’d be okay.

Maybe it’s because she’s holding Sam’s body, maybe because she’s thinking of heartbeats, or maybe because the world is so quiet in the space between songs on the radio, but Jess feels it when Sam’s heart restarts. It gives a thud – once, twice, pauses painfully and booms again. Jessica freezes, and this is when Sam gasps and grabs his neck. She shrieks and drives the needle into the palm of her hand.

Bobby finds them like that: Sam coughing, Dean retching and Jessica hopping around the garage, clutching her hand.

****

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000995f/)

Check out the [alternative Ch.5 header](http://tripoli8.livejournal.com/489124.html) at the artist's journal. Be warned that it contains realistic surgical stitches, which some people might not like to see.

**V.**

_\- And, after that, he took them one dark night and left them in the parish mortuary. But the coroner discovered them and made a fearful fuss. He said it was a plot to deprive him of his living by waking up the corpses._ (Jerome K. Jerome, _Three Men In a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)_ )

 

Dean doesn’t know how long he slept. He and Sam stayed up until they were cross-eyed with sleep deprivation, both secretly fearing that closing their eyes will drain the life right back out of them or that they’ll twist awkwardly and make their heads fall off. It was late morning when they gave in and lay down – him on the couch and Sam on the floor in the living room. Quite possibly, Bobby and Jessica spent the whole day tripping over them but Dean doesn’t remember waking up.

When he does wake up, it’s in the dead of the night. For a moment, he thinks he’s back in Bisbee because of the familiar hair-rising sensation of being stared at, but then the memory returns. Dean opens one eye – just barely.

Sammy’s ex-girlfriend is sitting at the foot of the couch, eyes gleaming in the dark, and her hair and pale skin make her look like a ghostly apparition. Now that he’s fully awake, Dean catches a faint metallic scent in the air. Jessica’s fingers appear stained with ink in the dark. He thinks of the knife under the couch.

Jessica’s hand twitches up like she wants to maybe lick her fingers or maybe grab his ankle poking from under the covers.

“What’re you doing, girl?” he says quietly.

Jessica seems to snap out of a trance. She twists her hands into her pajama pants, leaving dark smudges. “Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you. I just got up to have a snack. I figured it’s very important to eat when I wake up hungry.”

“Uh-huh.” At least that explains the blood.

“Relax, Dean,” she says. “I was just looking. Can’t I look?”

Dean kinda wants to take that as a compliment and be flattered that a beautiful woman would want to look at him with his grey skin and the bulky bandage holding his right eye in place until the blown socket fixes itself. But somehow, he doesn’t think that Jessica is interested in his face.

“You feeling okay?” he asks.

She sighs, relaxing a little. “I’m okay. You ever feel different at night?”

“That happens.” Dean’s bolder at night, or arguably, more stupid. At night, Sam says things he never would have even alluded to in the daylight. Dean always assumed it’s just the two of them, though, and not the rest of the world. He believed it to be a result of so many nights from their formative years spent digging up graves under the moon, when they didn’t have to pretend to be anything other than what they were.

Sam’s breathing pattern doesn’t change, but Dean becomes aware without looking that his brother’s awake.

“So,” says Jessica. “What now?”

“Thank you.” Her eyes flick over to Sam who sits up in the middle of his blanket nest, looking like a retarded kid with his craniotomy helmet. Dean drops his arm to the floor, trying to appear casual despite the awkward angle, so he could reach the knife if needed. “Thanks, Jess,” Sam says. “We owe you big time there, and we never thanked you.” And then he gets up on his knees and pulls her into a hug. Dean stiffens because sweet as she is, the girl’s a zombie.

He watches them – frozen in the moment, arms wrapped around each other. Stitches stand out on the pale, blotched skin of Sam’s neck even in the dark, so Dean thinks, maybe they’re not the ones to be talking about zombies.

“Don’t mention it,” says Jessica when Sam lets go. “What else are friends for, right?”

Dean leaves the knife alone and sits up, too. Jessica flashes him a smile, all blood-stained teeth, but somehow, she doesn’t look quite as creepy anymore. The girl just ate some raw meat – he’ll give her a break. So what if she came to stare? It’s not as if Dean never wanted anything he absolutely couldn’t have, never just stopped and looked.

“I was thinking about heading out,” she says. “There’re a few things I want to do. So I had to make sure we were okay. That… you know.” She shrugs and rubs her hands on her thighs again.

“You think we’re gonna hunt you down?” Sam says, sounding indignant, just as Dean says, “What kind of ungrateful bastards do you take us for?”

Jessica looks between the two of them. “You don’t have to worry about me. I figured it’s like chocolate: you don’t try it, and then you won’t know what you’re missing.”

“If you slipped,” Sam says, “we’d cover for you. But don’t, okay?”

“Brains don’t actually sound all that good.” She’s probably lying, but Dean chuckles anyway to acknowledge her effort. “So,” says Jessica. “Are you gonna come visit?”

 

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/dear_tiger/pic/0000axgk/)

 

****

Bobby’s first thought when he wakes up four days later is, _These damn kids._

He never cared much for music but Karen’s old records are still sitting around the house, and the very first time the Winchester boys stayed here – back when Dean was six and Sammy was a little shrimp – they dug them up and played them all day. It was old music, dusty music, Karen’s music that brought all kinds of memories back. Bobby wanted to chase them away that first day, but when he walked into the living room with an honest-to-god broomstick in his hand, the brothers were sitting on the carpet in front of Karen’s precious turntable that she had since she was a girl herself. They had such reverent looks on their faces like they were in a temple – even Sammy, who back then had an attention span of about ten seconds and that only for candy. Bobby left them alone, and ever since then he’s been buying more records on his trips to town: CDs, LPs and cassette tapes, rock and jazz and blues. If it didn’t have a half-naked woman or a gold-toothed, diamond-encrusted man on the cover, it was good. If it displayed a strange hairy creature of indeterminate sex wearing leather pants, it was better.

Jessica played Karen’s dusty jazz and blues records and swayed to them in the kitchen by herself. She left the previous morning in a pickup truck that Bobby and Dean fixed for her, with her Stanford Cardinal cap on the uncut blond mop. She kissed Bobby’s cheek and said that her parents gave her a Mustang when she was sixteen, and now this, oh Bobby, you’re the best!

Now that the Winchesters are back, it’s classic rock and metal again. They’re playing _Aerosmith_ this morning – neutral territory for them – so Bobby figures, things are good. He pulls on a robe and makes his way to the kitchen.

“Turn it down,” Sam says. “You’re gonna wake up Bobby.”

_Idjits, I’m an old man. A rat farts – I wake up._

The music grows a little softer. “Happy?”

“Yup. Don’t move.”

“My head better not come off, Sam. I’ll kick your ass if it comes off.”

“It won’t come off, now sit still.”

They’re seated at the kitchen table where a surgical kit is spread out among the remainders of breakfast. Dean has his head tilted back while Sam pulls out stitches from his neck with a pair of forceps. Sam rubs his thumb over the little holes in the skin and traces the outlines of the scar that Castiel said will go away eventually.

“Hey, Sam, what do you think happened to the angels?”

Sam shrugs and pulls another stitch with a little satisfied smile. “Don’t know. I read there was a small meteor shower that night – maybe they fell.”

“Or they got fried by Heaven.”

“Or that.” Sam gets a wretched look on his face but hides it quickly and pretends to look for something on the table. “No, I think they fell. Turn around.”

Dean turns his back to him and bends his head forward. Bobby sees Sam study the outline of Dean’s spine under the shirt for a moment before he shakes his head and gets to work. Bobby was hoping for eggs and bacon when walking here but he’s catching a strong “Do Not Disturb” vibe in the air, and now he’s not sure what he’s walking in on exactly. Better not be anything funny.

Sam says, “I’ve been looking through some papers.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s an article about a psycho down in New Mexico that cuts out people’s tongues. The police think he doses his victims with something ‘cause they all claim he had long claws and he didn’t cut but pulled out their tongues, like they weren’t attached.”

“Awesome.”

“That’s what I thought. And their tox screens are all coming back negative.” Sam pulls out the last of the stitches. “Okay, you’re good.”

“Come on, I’ll do yours now.”

Dean starts with the back of the neck first. He bends Sam’s head forward and lets his hand linger, feeling the now-intact bone. Sam must be sleepy or tired because he doesn’t protest like he normally would and just sits still with his eyes closed, elbows resting on his knees. Dean pushes against the back of Sam’s skull with the tips of his fingers, softly at first and then more firmly, and Sam makes a small sound that could be an expression of pain but probably isn’t.

When Dean leans forward with a strange look on his face, Bobby decides that there might be funny shit happening after all, and he’d rather not stay and find out what it is. Eggs and bacon can wait.

****

Why isn’t there a zombie romance?

Look at all these vampire and werewolf love stories – some more of a commercial success than others – that fill the Young Adult section of any bookstore. Fairies got big there for a while, though they didn’t hold: too close to elves and not quite monstrous enough, at least not in the pop culture version of a fairy. A monster is a powerful magnet because it possesses the freedom to be different and brings the promise of an adrenaline rush.

So what’s wrong with a little zombie romance? We like to read of love that pierces through the veil of death, or love that survives beyond the grave, but perhaps love that crawls back out of the grave is, well, too monstrous for our liking. It’s for sure not sexy.

There is this one B-movie about zombies—No, no, you wouldn’t know it. It’s an indie and very old anyway. And there’re two brothers who crawled out of Hell. In one scene I remember, they’re drinking coffee in a kitchen together the next morning and keep plucking little worms out of each other’s hair and dumping them into each other’s coffee. They both literally looked like death warmed over but it was sexier than any constipated vampire stalking scene I’ve ever seen.

I’m sorry, did I just make somebody barf back there?

(Jessica Moore, Ph.D. candidate, University of Minnesota, 2017)

****

There’s a Flying Dutchman of a car haunting American highways. Now you see it, now you don’t.


End file.
